Sparkles: Intro

SPARKLES 3/22/09

When my son picked this topic, I wasn’t totally on board. This word as he described it implies stars, romance, love, and blindness. I’m not sure I understand that stuff. It implies easy, quick, and potential fulfillment. Romance and love has always been hard work for me. There’s never been anything instantaneous about it. However if my son is implying lust or desire at first sight, I can identify with that. Who wouldn’t drool in the presence of Matt Bivens? I could write about lust at first sight but I could never finish the piece with a fulfillment paragraph as I have never carried through with this kind of lust or desire. So Matt Bivens, if you’re out there, you’re safe in my presence. I’ll just giggle a little bit in yours.

Anyway what threw me on this word “sparkle” is a childhood memory. My parents always encouraged exploration and education. We had dictionaries, thesaurus, and encyclopedias all over the house. And, one time, I had a chance to use them. There was this writing project in school in which I had to write a short bio of someone. This was in the fifth grade. We were studying the format of ‘biographies’ and so the project was to be simple and just one paragraph. I picked this kid in my Sunday School class to write about. No one associated with him because he farted a lot. The Sunday School teacher would be reading a Bible verse about praising the Lord and out would come a fart just at the moment of jubilation. Or we would have a moment of prayer and little bubbly noises could be heard in the silence. Needless to say this kid was mortified but his mom made him come every Sunday. I felt sorry for him – he was nice - and so took him on as the subject of my writing project.

A good biographer records facts faithfully, no-matter-what. So I couldn’t leave out any part of the story. When I got to the part of these farts I couldn’t just come out and write about “farts”, that wouldn’t be nice. So I went to my dictionaries, thesaurus and encyclopedias and looked up the word “fart” which led to other words like gas bubbles, emissions, odor, and intestinal disquiet. And then there it was – the perfect word – “spark” - and all its related words like sparkle and sparkling. There were nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I used them all as one sentence regarding this disturbing fact became a paragraph. I thought I was softening this peculiarity in the biography. Little did I know that upon publication of this bio (push-pinned to the bulletin board) I would found a new code word for use by my classmates. That poor kid became known as the kid with a sparkling personality. Then suddenly kids were using the Thesaurus to expand the reference. This kid, now, had an effervescent personality, a champagne disposition. He flickered, glittered, flowed, glowed, radiated, and twinkled. He had bounce, zip, liveliness and spirit. He beamed, bubbled, and danced. He was animated, and not simply animated, but “brilliantly” animated. That poor kid. I had wanted to say something nice and ended up creating a monster of a situation for which there could be no apology. His mom transferred him to another school.

I started a new craze. The thesaurus was the new Bible for us kids, and ordinary, unassuming words took on new definitions: Words like glitter, and phrases like flash of brilliance.

So when you read my official entry for this assignment just know it was the hardest one to write so far, because a sparkling romance means something else to me.