by Phil Ruby
Fairly recently I've been caught up in the Words with Friends game. I had heard of it, but did not realize until talking to someone that it's basically Scrabble in digital form. When I learned that! Well! Scrabble was my mother's favorite game. It was a go-to on our family game night, along with Monopoly, when we felt we had hours with nothing else to do.
My mother had an extensive vocabulary from reading, mostly the newspaper, doing crossword puzzles, etc. She loved word games of all kinds, which is interesting since she neither fully understood the meanings of, nor the correct pronunciations of many of the words she had learned. She just knew how they were spelled, and that's all that was needed for her to become an excellent Scrabble player. I learned a lot about words from my mother, and developed a love for words and the English language. That love was fed by one of my favorite school teachers, a high school English teacher named Ruth Oliver.
Perhaps those two are mostly responsible for my desire to write. I started writing stories and poems for myself, mostly, with pencil and paper as early as sixth grade. I have always had a vivid imagination, which developed thoughts I felt I needed to put on paper, even if no one ever read them.
Words, phrasing, humor, sarcasm, double-meanings, profundity in language, have always held a deep fascination for me.
Once, in junior high school, I wrote a poem for an English class assignment. I did some research on my own, reading poetry from a book my father had. I got some ideas, and wrote an original poem patterned after some of the works I had read. I got an "F" on that paper because the teacher did not believe I could have written it. She said it was too good for an eighth grader to write, even though she did not even try to find any evidence of plagiarism. Oh, well. Looking back, I can't say I blame her because my imagination sometimes caused me to have problems separating it from reality back then. Some of my imaginings seemed so real to me that I would occasionally tell them as truth. Because of that, I suppose I would have made an excellent politician! A little later in life, reality beat me over the head enough times to break me of that habit.
My father also played a role in developing my interest in words and language. He read everything he could get his hands on. I imagine if he had been and raised in the information age, as I have been, he would have burned up the Internet, and the midnight oil reading things he could never have had access to in our local book stores and libraries.
He read documentaries, fiction, science articles, and often information about other countries and cultures. His time in the Navy, traveling a good portion of the world, gave him an interest in diversity. He often talked about the people he met in other countries, and read about them when he could.
Words - they have been a huge part of my life. More than just communicating what I'm having for lunch or telling a joke.
My favorite author was Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens when I was young. He did not simply tell a story. He made me live it. Later, J. R. R. Tolkien became one of my favorites. He not only had a command of language, but even invented one! I hope to be able to write in such a way as to draw people into my words, so they are not just reading combinations of letters, but are becoming surrounded and engulfed by the images and feelings they convey.
