Memoirous

Tim Tintera’s Thesaurus I don’t know when I decided I was going to be a writer. Certainly I was a big reader, always had been and admired many writers, especially Louisa May Alcott. I wanted to be Jo. But that didn’t necessarily translate into being a writer. There must have come a time when it became obvious that it wasn’t a phase. The Jane who wrote poetry and fastidiously kept a journal was going to write her own stories. But first I had to steal Tim Tintera’s thesaurus. What a word! What was this odd kind of book. It was about numbers and words. It was half science and half English. With a smidgen of Latin—at least when it came to the arcane classifications. Yet a thesaurus made sense of the crazy universe. I was maybe a 6 th grader and Tim Tintera was a lot older. Likely an 8 th grader. I played after school with his sister. I might have thought he was cute, when he wasn’t being annoying and a bully. He mostly ignored us. Which was good because when I snuck into his...