First Lessons

I was up in front of the classroom, explaining something--I've long ago forgotten what--when a story from my own past occurred to me, a story I used just then to explain something-or-0ther in whatever poem or story I was talking about. I remember the room; we could go there today. It hasn't changed, except the blackboard is a whiteboard and the chairs, the seats, are plush.

All of that came back to me just as immediately as the story itself had that day in class. It had been something I'd experienced that quite suddenly had taken on a meaning through the years. I told myself, even as I was talking about it in front of class, that it would make a story, a short story I could write somehow, I could work on.

And it did, a story I finally ineptly called "The Voice of the Body" because a dead body did the significant talking. Still feels like an awkward title, but I must admit I loved the story I wrote back then. It's still one of my favorites.

I was working at the State Park down the road, in the booth at the entrance, selling stickers for admission, a good job every once in a while, better than cleaning toilets, picking up dead fish, or painting picnic tables. But working the booth meant you worked alone, jabbered only to people driving up in cars or pickups or buses.

The kids that showed up that morning were African-American. At the park, we didn't see a lot of Black people, but these guys were being rewarded for keeping their rooms cleaned, the hippy kid in charge told me. They were getting a canoe outing at Terre Andrea State Park, up north of Milwaukee, where they all lived. The Travelall their fearless leader was driving--long haired guy--was pulling a rack of Alumacraft canoes.

I wasn't a canoe-er, but when you grow up on the lake, you just know that when Lake Michigan is kicking up its heels, it's not a good idea to take a canoe out. You're going to spill. Canoes work when the lake is still as glass. They're wonderful. But most of them time, you're far better off on some docile farm pond.

I didn't tell them that. I didn't say it, and I know why--I didn't want to spoil the party. I didn't want to be some old Aunt Carol. I didn't want to be a party-pooper.

Four kids died that day, drowned in our park, and I got chewed out royally because the boss told me I should have told them not to take those canoes off the rack when the wind was as strong as it was that morning. Four kids died. 

That night, after work, after my folks had gone to bed, I sat up, alone, and for reasons I've long ago forgotten, I pulled out a tablet and a pen, laid it out before me, and just wrote stuff. What?--I don't know. I long ago tossed whatever it was that I scribbled down in that tablet. I don't know if it was confession or some abject petition for forgiveness. What I remember is that, as if out of nowhere, I put a pen or pencil to paper, as if somehow if I wrote about all that weight on my shoulders, it would somehow be lessened.

I didn't grow up wanting to be someone who has written as much as I have. I didn't write a novel about dinosaurs when I was ten, didn't write anything really, but notes for a club we had in middle school. One story, sophomore year in high school, but that's it really. 

But that night, more than any other, I suppose, I started in on an avocation that I'm still working at right now as I press these keys, two months or so after my 74th birthday. 

Seems a stretch, I know, but when I saw the picture up top last night, when this darling piece of writing came up on my iPad, I couldn't help thinking of a night when I was 18 years old and full of guilt, the night I pulled out a notebook because something in me determined that maybe if I wrote something I could feel something huge fall from my shoulders.

What you see is my granddaughter's very first bit of writing. She's four and beautiful and totally little-girl-ish, and yesterday in pre-school, her teachers put a slate down in front of her and the other kids, wrote out each of their names in dark black letters, then asked the kids to mimic what they saw. They asked those darling tots to begin to write their names.

It's as beautiful a picture as you'll find in Stuff in the Basement. It doesn't have a dime's worth of guilt in it, carries no ponderous weight, doesn't attempt to do anything more than mimic what the teacher wrote. Yesterday, my darling granddaughter had her first lesson in writing. 

I still can't help but smile.