My father was
a steamfitter, not a bricklayer, and yet he built a house of red brick, a big
square box of a house three stories tall with a chimney from basement to rooftop.
As a child I watched my father lay those bricks, one upon next, mortar troweled
onto one large side and each both short ends oozing through the holes.
The other day
at a large supermarket in my Seattle neighborhood I saw a free-standing wall of
stacked beer cases, and I could hear my father's snicker, see his head shaking in disbelief. I imagined what would have happened to this wall in the
earthquake in the recent San Francisco earthquake. For you see, unlike the
careful placed bricks in the walls of my childhood home, staggered by a half
brick for structural stability, the beer cases were aligned one atop the next.
I was tempted to give the wall a tiny push. I hoped no child would
unintentionally do so.
My father was
not an educated man, but he was a reader and he had abundant common-sense and the
ability to figure out most challenges he faced. Still, he and my mother were
determined their daughters attend college.
Now I teach
language and write books. As I teach, I think of grammar as the mortar holding
vocabulary together and language acquisition as a wall of knowledge that grows
one row of brick at a time.
As
a writer, I think of strong verbs and concrete nouns as the bricks of a solid
piece of writing, the mortar as the essential connections holding the story
together. A bricklayer can lay bricks in a variety of patterns to create both
beauty and utility, just as a writer chooses words to best express the action
or emotion of a piece of writing.
But
the author and the teacher must be alert so that unlike the wall of beer cases
at my local supermarket, the language acquisition begins from a strong base and
the story does not collapse upon itself.
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