I can’t remember the very moment that I fell in love with the written word, but it must have been somewhere in between learning how to walk amongst the high, brambling leaves in my backyard, and discovering the secret ingredient in my grandmother’s winter beef stew.
My first memories are visual; single words that I used to scrawl with crayons near my bed, words that I learned as my father read to me from books by Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Simple words like ‘water’ and ‘sea,’ appeared more magical to me not only from hearing them, but more so now that I could orchestrate them myself.
As a young child, I fondly remember long Indian summer evenings when the crickets and moths outside my window sang and danced, and I read for hours on end without any sense of space or time.
It seemed any book would do after the initial musical words and rhymes of Dr. Seuss and Beatrix Potter seduced both my mind and heart. My sister and I spent weekends memorizing, and copying our favorite prose in our own handmade books, along with sketches that we stapled together, and garnished with discarded ribbons.
This is also about the time that I began to write my own short stories, and essays, in which I discovered the power and clarity that words had upon my own thinking. As I learned how to string the words together into sentences and then paragraphs, my thoughts and imagination flourished.
My greatest inspiration was when I first learned to how to write letters, which I sent regularly to friends and family. A simple yet invaluable personal way of correspondence that today seems more of an ancient lost art form with the advent of emails and texting.
My grandmother still cherishes the bundles of letters I have sent her over the years. I spent hours sitting on my bed writing long letters written in cursive with number two pencils describing summer vacations; plays that I wrote and directed in school; and ruminations and dreams about what I planned to do in the coming years.
To this day, when I take the time out to write even the shortest letter inserted into a card sent by regular mail, I receive the most thoughtful of responses, even more so today as the act of letter writing has become so rare and may I say, obsolete.
My father instilled a true love of words in my siblings and me through his own love of writing of vivid imagery and descriptions to go along with his paintings. As an artist, he expressed how different mediums of art complimented each other rather than becoming a contradiction on any front.
One day while streaming through stacks of art books in his study, I came upon numerous old journals filled with poems, and stories about his travels as a young college bound youth in the early 1950’s.
After he graduated high school in Los Angeles, he headed north to San Francisco where he met and became friends with the likes of poet Allen Ginsburg, and Jack Kerouac, who wrote the infamous cult classic, “On the Road.”
He told me that this period was an amazing time to be a young artist, a renaissance if you will, as people seemed to be “incredibly open to discovering and accepting all forms of art.” “Writing,” he said, “about my adventures both inspired and helped me to discover that I was most passionate about painting.”
As I began to work on my new book on a particularly cold, foggy, and quiet morning last week, I opened up my laptop with my darkly brewed coffee in hand, and found the pages I had been working on.
However, on this day, I suddenly felt the urge to write longhand, so I brought out my spiral notebook, a number two pencil as I did when I was a child, and I felt the words pour out of my mind, and through my hands onto the page with a fierce sense of calm, and effortlessness.
The great, late writer Truman Capote beautifully said, “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”
I wrote for hours that day and into the next, in my notebook, and felt new words express themselves in a simple and serene way I had not felt since I was a child.
I suppose my love for the written word has never diminished, rather it grows stronger as I get older, and now appreciate the limitless possibilities of the expressions, and deeper meaning words carry.