For the Love of Words
Writing and other superpowers
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Language Arts
I love watching my grandsons Ryan and Jake when they are writing.
What does a boy imagine as he moves a pen across a page? What will he think if he has a chance to read those words 60 years from now?
Ryan, who is 9, accepted my offer to buy him journal. Jake, 11, declined. Jake’s school days are full of writing and reading, so I don’t think he sees a blank page as recreation—yet.
They are both reading a series by Shannon Messenger, Keeper of the Lost Cities. I bought Kindle versions of Books 1 and 2 of the 9-book set. I didn’t immediately love reading them, but now I’m hooked.
In the series, Sophie Foster, 12, is raised as a human and learns she is actually an elf with super abilities.
“A lifetime of human teaching was difficult to forget,” the story says. Sophie and her friends face many challenges, which they overcome with courage, loyalty to each other, and kindness. They discover who they are. They stand up for what’s right.
At breakfast yesterday, I asked Ryan and Jake what superpowers they would like to have. Jake said “pyrokinesis,” the ability to control fire with your mind. (I misremembered his superpower while recording today’s Morning Journal.)
Ryan would like to be a Light Leaper, who can teleport from place to place via light.
“How about you, D?” I asked Darlene.
“I’d be a colorizer,” she said. That’s someone who can change anything to a different color in order to see which one looks best. A good quality for a maker of fabric collage artwork.
“I’d like to be able to see the future,” I offered. “I guess that would be a futurizer.”
This morning we attended Special Visitors’ Day at Carroll School, where Jake is finishing fifth grade before returning to the public schools in his town. For 58 years, Carroll has been helping kids with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences to read and thrive.
We sat with Jake as his Carroll tutor played word games based on the suffixes common to adjectives and adverbs. It made me remember my delight when I learned how to diagram sentences from Miss Garufus at Wayland Junior High School 62 years ago.
Jake and Ryan are both gifted storytellers. Their imaginations are the superpower fueling all the others.
Living with them for a week while their parents are on a well-earned vacation with friends is opening many doors for Darlene and me.
They spent 90 minutes of non-stop jumping at the Nova Adventure Park in Lynnfield this afternoon. My sprained left knee kept me on firm ground, but Darlene joined in for most of the action.
We are chilling back here at the house this evening.
I will join them downstairs after posting this, to follow along with Jake’s mesmerizing mastery of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on Nintendo Switch. Ryan is playing a game on his iPad, and Darlene is reading her Kindle Oasis.
Words and stories, made new every day, a generational transfer of infinite power.
