What do I want to know?

For starters, I always wanted to know WORDS. That is at heart what a wordsmith is, one who loves words, collects words, wants to understand words. My earliest full memory is about words, a story I've told many times, so you've probably already heard it.

I see my grandmother's chandelier beyond the head of my uncle (possibly Uncle Paul), who is looking down toward Nancy and me standing at his feet. He asks Nancy, "What grade are you in?" and she says, "First grade." That's all of the conversation I remember, but my perplexity rings clear in my memory. What were they talking about? How could she be in a "firstgrade" when I could clearly see she was in a room? What's a "firstgrade" anyhow? I didn't even understand our uncle's question, but Nancy knew and she answered him. EVERYBODY knew what the words meant ... except me! I couldn't stand it! I wanted to know what all the words mean, all of them, every word in the world. Even Nancy, a little girl herself, knew what these words meant, and I didn't. It was so frustrating.

As an adult I pondered my memory of confusion and perplexity, realizing I must have been very, very young if Nancy was in the first grade. Nancy, after all, is four years older than I am. Let's see, she would be six years old in the first grade, making me ... two?!? This means I struggled with words and understanding grown-up talk from the age of two? Wow! In later years I realized an uncle whose name I don't remember would probably be one who lived away from Chattanooga. Many people were milling around in Grandma Reynolds's living room that day, meaning an uncle (one of her sons) was there for something big. A funeral? Probably, since Grandma died in early May 1943. That means I had just turned three years old a week earlier, and Nancy was at the end of her first year in school.
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What do I want to know? is an excerpt from a longer post: Wisdom gained the hard way