I love Starbucks’ coffee fraps. And when I say love, that is not an exaggeration. You could probably inveigle me into almost anything if you had one of those cool, sweet, coffee treats. Helping you move, babysitting your eight kids, or driving the get away car just doesn’t seem like a bad idea when a coffee frappucino is involved.
Inveigle, if you don’t know,means to entice or persuade by guile.
I’ve been a wordphiliac for a very long time. I remember tearing open my birthday gifts on my 9th birthday to find a copy of “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein. I couldn’t have been happier to receive that collection of poems even as my cousins taunted me for being such a nerd. In their world, a little kid who got a book as a gift was not happy about it.
I’m remembering that day, because April is National Poetry Month. And I remembering the poem the book was titled after.
Where the Sidewalk Ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
And I’m remembering searching for that place where the sidewalk ends where the world was different, better than the one I lived in. Where I could do anything and everything I wanted. Where kids ruled and there were no rules.
Needless to say, I never found the place where white grass grows but my search for the place where the sidewalk ends has not stopped, although my vision of it is a little different now. When you grow up believing in a place where the sidewalk ends it’s not so hard to imagine a place where every human is free and has access to clean water, education, and health care. A place where you can trust the food you eat and the air you breathe. A place where nature is respected and protected. A place where the dollar bill isn’t God and what’s on the inside matters more than the outside. Yeh, like a said, my vision of the place where the sidewalk ends is a little different now.
Today’s word comes from the urban dictionary. The word pac-manning means to drive down the middle lane of a highway/street, over the painted white lines, resembling Pac Man eating pellets. Pretty cool huh?
I remember going camping with my school, and we each got a little compass to help us navigate our way through the woods. That was a lot of fun. That was before GPS and a whole lot of things I would have never imagined. Must be so easy now for the kids to be pioneers. But sometimes it’s not about finding your way. Sometimes it’s about choosing a path and the signs can seem to be quaquaversal.
Quaquaversal, my fellow wordphiliacs, means point in all directions.
The more I write in this blog, the more you are going to learn about me. I’ll tell you one thing straight out. I am not a morning person. But since the world insists on starting so early I have to adjust-as best I can. In the morning it definitely takes a lot to bestir myself.
Bestir means to rouse oneself. It can also mean to exert oneself, which absolutely will not happen in the morning.
I ran across a post in a forum. A poster was wondering if was possible to have a word fetish. She suspected that she might have one. Someone responded to her post saying, ‘absolutely and I think Mary Poppins and her supercalifragilisticexpialidocious started the crap’ (poster’s word not mine).
And I thought…could it be? I remember practicing the made up word over and over until I was able to let it fly off my tongue with ease. I also remember how delighted I was when I had accomplished the feat. I did like the word. It was the first word I just like saying. I had forgot about the word until I ran across that post. And now and I am remembering and thinking, maybe…
