The Dictionary

The Dictionary

Tracy Stegall

In first grade, I realized certain things had to be committed to memory: my own address and phone number first and foremost. It was then I realized that people hold a collection of numbers and places in the great file box called "brain". Going home one evening, I asked my mom to write down my grandparents' addresses-- these should be part of my own file box. It's telling that my father's parents dropped through the sieve of my brain, but my mother's parents-- my favorite grandparents-- their address stuck. 3810 19th Street was sold last summer after my grandmother, my last remaining grandparent, passed away. Nanny and Papa will always live in my heart at 3810 19th Street.

The living room, paneled in light maple wood, resonated with echoes of conversation, bridge, and bourbon. Two rusty orange easy chairs sat next to the sandstone hearth of the fireplace with matching drawered end tables beside them: one for Nanny, one for Papa. A wordsmith, Nanny's diction was perfect. Other people ate "sanwiches," but she always had a "sanDwich". She loved long, drawn-out jokes (even dirty ones) especially when the punch line was a play on words. She read voraciously-- books, magazines, The Hutchinson News front to back each morning and The Great Bend Tribune each night. Found in the table beside Nanny's chair were scissors because she was a clipper. She clipped articles for herself, her friends, her daughters, her granddaughters. I imagine that as she read through her many stacks, she rarely encountered words she didn't know� but when she did, she looked them up in her prized possession: The Third Edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (copyright 1966). Papa, Superintendent of the Great Bend Schools, stole it from the district warehouse and gave it to her as a gift. He couldn't afford such an expensive book on an educator's salary!

Nanny seemed to be on a life-long word quest. She went about tracking words that she DIDN'T find in that unwieldy book. She clipped articles and columns referencing the subtle definition of French toast and groupings of animals (a nye of pheasants, a dray of squirrels). She tore out an entire article from Today's Education in 1978 entitled "Teaching About the Metric System" which references the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. And she wrote words on scraps of paper-- words not found in her dictionary. Words like ombudsman, cyborg, hellacious, and jet fatigue. In addition to these scraps, she also kept the history of her antique dictionary stand. Thanks to one of those antique shows, she discovered that this unassuming piece of furniture had quadrupled in value since she purchased it. The dictionary and stand lived in many different places over the years-- in the entryway� next to the TV in the living room. My 33-year-old love affair began with this book-- with Nanny.

Six years ago, I received this book as a gift. I wept when my mother brought it to Boulder one summer after visiting Nanny in the stifling Kansas July heat. And now, the dictionary (and the stand) hold a prominent place in my own living room. I use it all the time-- and each time I open it the fragile, brittle scraps of paper replete with my grandmother's handwriting float aimlessly to the ground. Tears well up and I always wish I could see words like "rad", "zip drive", and "gui interface" written there as well. I want her to know these words� I want her to still know me. And then I remember� she does. I find the nearest scrap I can, and I begin writing: "gui interface-- the computer programming that makes a Mac or a Windows system user-friendly. It hides the code." And then I sigh. She wouldn't know what "code" means. I'll have to keep writing.