Words - My Currency, My Tools, My Arms.

I was seven when I wrote my first short story. It was a thinly-veiled roman à clef about a little girl named Gracie Andrews who gets sick and has to go to the hospital. The stupid rules say parents can't spend the night with their kids, but Gracie's not having any of it. She tells the head nurse, "That is patently unfair." The nurse replies, "'Patently'? Goodness gracious, dear, that's quite a big word for such a small girl to use." "I know my rights," Gracie replies.

In the end, the hospital compromises and allows Gracie's mom (but not her dad) to stay overnight.

"One out of two ain't bad," Gracie notes, summing up the moral of the story. Which is, You may not win every round every time but you can sort of win some of the rounds most of the time. And you do it by having a really good vocabulary and knowing when and how to use it.

Words. They're my currency, my tools, my arms. I was born in Havana, Cuba, and my parents and I emigrated to the United States when I was a baby, after the Revolution. I was still learning my native language, Spanish, when we came here on a very bitter November day. Suddenly, I had to deal with winter and learn English, too, or die. That's really how I thought about it: If I don't learn this new language, I will cease to exist. I will be invisible and I will disappear in this cold, strange new country. An avalanche of white will fall down and silence me. So it wasn't "Live free or die." It was "Speak English or die."

The importance not only of language, but of the specific words in the given language, those words' precise meanings — became my all-consuming mission as a toddler. My mother had begun teaching me to read in Cuba, mostly by memorizing the lovely children's poems of our country's great poet laureate, José Martí. So I knew my alphabet and a lot of words already, and I was young enough at the time to absorb yet another language without much angst. You could say language came naturally to me. Then again, Fidel Castro didn't leave me or my family much choice.

My parents had studied English in Cuba and could speak it fairly fluently, but I knew I'd have to get way past "fairly" to get where I wanted to go, which was a career as a writer. I watched American TV endlessly (mostly The Lucy Show and Captain Kangaroo), I listened to jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald, I read English-language children's books and dictionaries voraciously. They were all like my food.

One day one of my neighbors, an older girl named Pamela, commented on my "pretty patent leather Mary Janes." I said, "My what?" "Your shoes," she said. "Huh?" I said. "'Mary Janes', that's the style," she explained. "That's what we call the kind of shoes you're wearing." "Oh," I said, "and what's 'patent'?" "When the leather's all shiny like that," she said. "Okay, thanks," I said, "I have to go." I ran inside to my cherished dictionary and looked up the words. "Patent" had more than one meaning. I found that fascinating. I wrote down all of patent's meanings and Scotch taped the piece of paper to the mirror on the medicine chest in the bathroom. I always did that so I could learn as many words as possible as quickly as possible and commit them to memory so I could use them to not die.

Shortly after the encounter with Pamela, my throat swelled up and I couldn't talk or swallow without pain. My tonsils. At Children's Hospital in D.C. the nurse wouldn't let my parents stay with me. The last thing I'd done before we left for my surgery was to brush my teeth. As I did so, I reread the definitions of "patent." One, the adverb "patently," meant, "very noticeable especially for being incorrect or bad."

That was almost 30 years ago. I still believe that patent — and, to a greater degree, all words — saved my life. My surgery went fine, I really did tell the nurse what I later fictionalized, my real mom really did get to sleep over in the room with me. And me, I lived to speak and write another day. Who could ask for anything more? Except, well, maybe a new pair of pretty patent leather Mary Janes.

The perfect outfits exists, but does the perfect man? Little Pink Raincoat is a featured book in Fiction Readers, a group to discuss contemporary women's fiction, books, women's issues and much more. Click here to join the group.