Loving Words

I love words. I love what they can do. I love that through a vast collection of them totaling anywhere from 100 to 200 or more pages, I can visit the Supreme Court, I can spend time in New Mexico, I can learn about various rooms in the White House, I can learn about the men who occupied those rooms. I love the comfort and stability words bring, as important to me as how walking through the College of the Canyons campus in my two years every late Friday afternoon helped me maintain my stability in my confusion about what Santa Clarita was, what it all meant, some inkling about what it was supposed to be. I love that through words, I have learned more and more about the history of Las Vegas, my future home city, seeing in my mind those streets that I'll soon drive, discovering what they were long before they were those streets, what was on them, what they replaced over time.

I love how I can sit on the couch for just an afternoon, read an entire novel, and felt that I've been somewhere entirely different, living a life I'll never live myself, but which I want to know. I love how with words I feel a kinship with writers who inspire me, writers that I want to emulate and yet establish my own style, and writers whose books make me want to do the best I can as I set out to write my own. I love that through words, I have learned more about the Airport series than Universal ever offered through its two-disc DVD set in 2004, a set I still proudly own. I love that I've learned so much about Jennings Lang, executive producer on the three sequels, just from reading old articles in family scrapbooks. I know that if it was possible to meet him (he died in 1996), I would have really liked him, since we both push for what we want, and both talk a mile a minute. My co-author can attest to that, after meeting him two weeks ago (more on that in a forthcoming entry).

I love that yesterday, I finished reading Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court by Jan Crawford Greenburg, and it made me think of the biography I have of retired justice David Hackett Souter by Tinsley E. Yarbrough that I've tried reading many times before, but never made it through. It's not that it's bad (Souter is one of my favorite justices, mainly because of his quiet personal life, which included having to move a new, more expansive home after he found that his family's farmhouse (owned by his late parents) could not structurally support his book collection), but just that it was never the right time to get into it. Reading more about Souter in Supreme Conflict and figuring that those details are in this biography since Greenburg mentions it at the beginning of her notes section in the back, I want to see what else this biography holds for me to learn.

I love that because of words, I'm telling you all this right here. There are so many of them to use, and I chose all these. And after this, I'm going to go back to that Souter biography, probably finish it today, and see what I want to read next. There's so many choices, and I'm never intimidated by that. I love it. All because of words.