Going Inkless

     Writing tends to be a solitary activity.  We may be able to perform it in crowded places if we're lucky enough to have the focus while riding the train or sitting in some common space.  When you come down to it, though, the actual act of stitching the words together into meaningful patterns is all done alone in your head.  With that basic fact established, I will also say that writing is more social than most other things you do alone.  For one thing, writers of fiction tend to walk around with all sorts of people in their heads.  Even when we are alone, our minds are often working in social ways.  But the aspect I wanted to examine in this post was the camaraderie among those who practice this solitary art.      While it could be said that authors are in competition with each other, you rarely see them behave as if they were.  There is a realistic limit on how many books may be published in the world, and...

     We had a big dictionary when I was a child.  It was a magnificent book full of words I hadn't learned yet, with a glossy section in the centre that displayed various bits of interesting categorical information - planets, birthstones, zodiac signs.  This hefty tome was just one of a small reference library we kept.  My parents loved books as much as I do.  The ones I remember best were the mythology, the series on plant, animal and mineral identification, and a heavily illustrated book of World War I airplanes (Snoopy's Sopwith Camel and the Red Baron's Fokker were in there.)  And of course, the set of encyclopedias was a particular treasure.  Everything you wanted to know about was in there, at least to some degree, and we used them often.  Whenever we asked Mom a question she couldn't answer, she'd take us to the encyclopedia and look it up with us.  It was like Mom's spare brain.  I suppose that habit empowered us to bec...

     When I applied to be an exchange student, it was at the suggestion of my French teacher.  Mme. LaFrancis (and with that name, how could she have been anything but a French teacher) was one of the people in my life who believed in me enough to make me think that the world could be open for me in spite of the hurdles.  I was in my third year of French at the time.  The first year had been a normal classroom experience, but the second and third were independent study.  Mme. LaFrancis saw enough promise in me that she arranged for me to continue in French despite schedule conflicts.  We would meet for 15 minutes of each 30 minute lunch period for me to turn in assignments, ask questions or take tests.  The rest was all on my own time.  I was no expert, but I was comfortable with the language at that point.  I wrote to a pen pal in French, entertained myself by taking notes for other classes in French, and even read an untranslated ...

a short trip...      In the course of planning and designing a website, I've started to wonder how the internet became a place.  It's a fairly new concept as a whole, and somewhere along the way as it has grown, we gradually decided to think of it as a place.  We chose terminology appropriate to that idea.  There are sites you find at an address.  You can go into a chat room or go to a page.  You can view a gallery or library.  You start out  and return to a home.  Every mailbox has a place it's @.  Yet all this real estate is in your head.  It's imaginary.  Of course, the information that makes up this imaginary landscape is kept somewhere.  Even the airy "cloud" you picture is a heavy, earthbound mass of silicon and wiring somewhere in the physical world, or rather several masses.  But that information is what constitutes the internet, not the machines it's stored on.  The internet is really an id...

     I cringe when I hear someone called "crafty", and I doubt I will ever feel comfortable using the word on someone who does crafts.  This is one of those situations where common misuse legitimizes an error, like the modern spelling of "donut".  What was once improper becomes not only accepted, but more commonly used than the original.  Language changes with use.  It is alive that way, and I fully accept that describing someone as crafty now means that they either enjoy doing crafts or excel at them, or some combination of the two.  It just doesn't sit right that way in my vocabulary.      When I first encountered the word, it didn't apply to crafts at all.  If you were good with your hands or inclined to crochet, whittle or make collages, people might say you were creative, talented or industrious.  To say you were crafty would be mildly insulting.  It meant you were up to something, something that probably had l...

Many a cook has claimed their food tastes better because it was cooked with love. A product from my kitchen is as likely to have been cooked with another four letter word - or several. Oh, there's love, too, but for me the struggle and swearing are part of the process. My father was an ex marine and a truck driver. He was a fisherman in his free time and an often belligerent alcoholic; so, it's really a wonder that I'm allowed in polite company at all. His bad example helped to demonstrate that there's a time and a place to exercise my vocabulary, and as a result, only a few people could guess the extent of it. Even as a teen, I was always amused when guys I hung out with would apologize for the occasional slip. Apparently, my image, built up from being a reader and a good student, a relatively wise and responsible child, put me in the category with mothers, teachers and librarians. I was a delicate creature who would be easily shocked by rude language. In truth...

My grandfather died when I was fairly young, but I still have a few fuzzy memories of him. They are mostly just a sense of the man, stitched together in the time since then with family stories and old photographs. It all layers into an image not unlike a smiling, sun-browned apple doll, a man who had packed his years full of hard work, full of living. Though I can't remember anything he said specifically, I know that it was probably in Spanish. He had come here from Mexico at fifteen years old and hadn't stopped working long enough to study English. I'm sure he had picked up enough to get by. He was capable of communicating with his German-American wife who spoke no Spanish. He held a job and raised his children, but whatever little bits of English he knew were never as comfortable as his native tongue. My father, his son, is bilingual, as is often the case with the children of immigrants. My generation, however, was raised without that gift. English was the lang...