Give Them Words

When God spoke, He unleashed a world.

Our tongues, says the writer James, contain a world.

If we can think at all, we deal with the world of words. We hear them. We make them. We search—if we are intent on being careful with our words—for just the right ones to unleash, whether spoken or written.

When we realize that God’s image stamps us, we will approach our words with care. What is it we want to unleash?

My childhood was replete with words. Ordinary, household words, like “eat your supper,” or “it’s bedtime.” I never expected my mother to say, “The princess’s delicacies are waiting on the table for her royal enjoyment and nourishment.” Or, perhaps, “The princess will now be carried on a pillow to her bed by her royal father, the king.” Of course not.

But it was different when I listened to stories read to me. And when I began reading them on my own. I wanted lovely words and expressions. Words that—yes—unleashed a world I did not inhabit. I did not consciously know I wanted those words. But I recognized them when I saw or heard them.

Much as children must live and move in the ordinary world of parental instructions and school assignments, they want a different world in their imagination.

Snatches of my young childhood’s favorite books come back in loved phrases:

“The crows all rose in a wild, black scatter…”

The black crows saw the fox. I can see the red fox with his bushy tail, sneaking stealthily through the yellow cornfield toward the swarming rabbit warren. And I can see the dreamy bunny, sitting in “the immense folding leaves of a cabbage.” The bunny saw the crows.

And I can see all the busy bunnies scurrying around with their household chores, too intent to notice the crows. Too intent to heed that wild warning.

But the dreamy bunny—who was not considered useful—warned one of the busy bunnies of the red fox. That bunny then thumped his hind feet to tell the other bunnies to flee! Quickly!

I can see the disappointed fox, finding nothing but rabbit holes deep in the ground, where he cannot reach. I see him slinking back to his lair, perhaps a wiser fox.

“And it was still very early in the morning…”

The dreamy bunny was what is called a reflective observer.

I loved the dreamy bunny. I was dreamy, too. I was told, much later in life, that I was a reflective observer.

In The Town of Dipsy-Doodle, everything is upside down or backwards. The people are quite eccentric and delightfully strange. The mayor is a baby with a deep voice. Children walk on their hands. You can go downhill or uphill, but you cannot do both. I can see the boy on his velocipede (otherwise known as a tricycle) trying to navigate the unnavigable hills. Woe to you if you try to visit Dipsy-Doodle. Chances are, you may not be able to get back out. The boy and his velocipede almost don’t.

I loved Dipsy-Doodle. I loved its strangeness. I wanted to go there. I was told, later in life, that I was eccentric. (I came to appreciate that designation.)

At the training yards in the village of Lower Trainswitch, “far, far to the west of everywhere,” young engine Toodle is trying to learn to be a sleek, grown-up Flyer. But Toodle would rather leave the tracks to pick daisies in the meadow and run races with the horse. Toodle has some severe lessons to learn about staying on the tracks and not spilling the soup in the dining car. “Stay on the rails, no matter what!” If he continues to leave the rails, he will never become a Flyer.

I loved Toodle. And his lessons in obedience were not lost on me, quite without being unnecessarily didactic. Rather, playfully wonderful.

I loved Saturday mornings around the breakfast table when my mother would turn on the radio to “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” My sister and brothers and I were transported to stories of make-believe and mystery. The only pictures were those in our heads, but they were enough. Gone was our cramped kitchen with its painted wooden table and chairs, gone, the shelf that held ordinary objects of daily life. For the space of half an hour, we could inhabit quite another world, far, far away.

I pondered: where was that place “east of the sun and west of the moon”?

Blessed place. Blessed Saturday morning.

Later in childhood, but not much later, I would sit in the big, overstuffed rocking chair in the living room with Mother’s One Hundred and One Famous Poems and read and memorize, just by dint of multiple re-readings, poems not written with children in mind. “On the eighteenth of April in ’75/ hardly a man is still alive/ who remembers that famous day and year…” I watched Paul Revere ride from town to town, crying alarm to the citizenry. I saw the Old North Church tower with its signal light, “One if by land, and two if by sea…” i

Or: “… a woman sat in unwomanly rags/ plying her needle and thread…” And while she was sewing, she sang “with a voice of dolorous pitch.” She was singing “The Song of the Shirt.” I can see that desolate woman in that dismal place, wondering “if this is Christian work.” ii I did not know the word “dolorous,” but I could hear it.

Or: “The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas” when “…the highwayman came riding, riding/ up to the old inn door…” And I hear the “Thlot, thlot” of the horse’s hooves as they carried their rider on his dark purpose. I thrilled to the maiden inside, tied to a chair and gagged, “with a muzzle beneath her breast.” iii

The poems were without illustrations, except for cameos of the authors. But the pictures in my head were enough. Possibly, better.

The words that filled my childhood reading were not necessarily profound in a literary sense. In fact, in most cases, they were deceptively simple. It was the way they were put together—rhythmically, lyrically—that captured my imagination. Who could forget “the crows all rose in a wild black scatter”? I think of that line every time I see a crow.

Words shape us. Words plus imagination in childhood form souls that are a bastion against insanity, the insanity of a world gone amok, which has been every age since the beginning of time. They are a fortress to run to when life gets sad and fails us. There is another world. If there were not, we could not imagine there to be one.

Give children the gift of dreaming in “the immense folding leaves” of a parent’s or grandparent’s arm and voice, or that of a beloved aunt or uncle or teacher. Give them words plus imagination that will still come back to them in their eighties.

Consider this from C.S. Lewis: “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty." iv

Give them words that last.

i The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

ii The Song of the Shirt, by Thomas Hood

iii The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

iv C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds and Stories