~William Shakespeare~
******
I was puttering around my office trying to wring any kind of inspiration I could out of a sluggish mind when I spied my family dictionary. It's a vintage 1970 Unabridged Dictionary and the only thing from my childhood that remains outside of photographs and memories of course. I remember hating it with a passion. I would ask my father what a word meant, or how to spell it and he would say "Go look it up Beth Ann".
It changed at some point in my childhood and I honestly can't remember when. What I do remember is laying on the living room floor in San Antonio on this HUGE woven rug on my belly and thumbing through it and being absolutely fascinated. I had not yet been diagnosed as dyslexic and I struggled every day with reading comprehension, but with the dictionary I was reading words not sentences. They were chopped up, sounded out and defined in a way I could absorb. Thinking back to that day, nearly Forty years ago, I can say with a fair amount of certainty, that was the day my love affair with words began.
Many years ago I remember seeing it stuffed in a closet at my folks house, dusty and forgotten. I asked my mother if I could have it. It rests, in it's original base made of some sort of fragrant wood that still smells of my childhood. It's in my office and usually ignored, except on rare occasions when inspiration strikes. Lord knows I still can't spell worth a damn, but my vocabulary is immense. Thanks in part to this big green behemoth. 
