Thaumaturgy at Work

Kitchen Table Magic

The very best gifts come unbidden and take your breath away: a glorious sunset; a tiny shoot coming out of a very dead pot; the face of a long forgotten friend in a crowded shopping mall; flowers left on the doorstep. Thaumaturgy at work.

A week ago, I wouldn’t have known a word like that, let alone been able to use it. But a friend of mine turned into a thaumaturgist, or maker of magic and miracles, when he gave me my very own two-volume Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary complete with magnifying glass!

For years, I have coveted this weighty tome, longed to look up the whole story of a word without going to the library, but I hardly expected the OED to come to me one ordinary afternoon in December. Thaumaturgy is like that though: sudden and startling and out of the blue.

As with most love stories, I remember the time and place when it all began: the enchantment of words. For me, reading began early, and throughout childhood was a means not only of escape but of encounter with worlds I knew were there beyond and beneath the surface of things. My favorite was Volume I of The Young Junior Classics, a thick book with a red cover (that fell off with so much wear and tear) titled: “Fairy Tales & Fables.”

But the real awakening took place in a nondescript classroom at Sacramento State College in the middle of a blistering July afternoon. Taking a summer course in the Romantic Poets, the first literature class I had ever taken after high school, I was quite lost, young, looking for something but didn’t know what. There was no air- conditioning in the classroom, and as I looked out the open windows to the flat, scorched landscape, the gorgeous, bubbling words of John Keats in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” soaked into me like three days of rain. I knew that finding my way had something to do with words.

And now so many years later, the OED rests on the kitchen table, beckoning me to look up every word I’m not sure of or unfamiliar with, to take off my glasses and peer through the magnifying glass to read the tiny type that explains a word and its parentage and what it has become through the ages, all of this backed up by diverse quotes showing the word at work.

It’s all magic to me: the giving of the gift, the OED itself, the effort and happiness of using words to express what would otherwise lie silent, buried, unborn. Thaumaturgy, indeed.