Some of My Earliest Memories

When I was in the third grade*, a really enthusiastic middle-aged man visited our classroom and talked about creative writing. He had the caffeine- or crack-induced high of a self-help guru, and spoke in a really loud voice.

Ever the type-A student, I sat politely in my seat as my eardrums felt like bleeding, my hands folded neatly in front of me. My teacher, Mrs. Wiland, sat at her corner desk, disciplining us with her eyes; I silently refused to make a fool out of her by pointing out that the visiting speaker was a few decibels short of a jackhammer.

The man talked about how a particular phrasing can unlock and open up doors of the imagination. His thick brown hair barely moved, and his smiles seemed too quick. He led a discussion about literary and grammatical devices, and all the while made exaggerated hand movements. He walked us through a few word game exercises, and simultaneously leered as if overselling his methods. He laughed amiably along with our guffaws and triumphs, and smugly turned to our teacher. It was like he hadn't realized he was pandering to a bunch of seven- and eight- year olds. What the hell was he trying to sell us? What was my teacher a conspirator to?

The whole time, I was patiently waiting for his time to be up. I didn't want to be forced to write. This gift of linking up written shapes and audible sounds, catering to the expectations of an audience then surpassing them - it filled me with a pride and power that scared me. I didn't want the coos of praise from adults. I didn't want the attention. It all perpetuated a cycle: praise had to be followed by more praise, attention by more attention. It was like a line on a graph; I could accept and understand if its slope remained the same, but climbing would only accentuate falling. And falling...? I'd been taught that failure was unacceptable.

Writing was my first home, but my first dwelling was with my mom and my maternal grandparents, in Brooklyn. My grandmother, ever the racist, elitist bigot, taught at a public school at the time. She came home with stories about all the black kids being rude and mean and always calling her "chinky." (Back then, no one knew what a Filipino was. Now, the general familiarity of my heritage never ceases to amaze me!) She said that poor people were dirty and black people were poor, and espoused this kind of verbal attack despite the fact that we lived in a working-class black neighborhood.

The good thing about my grandmother, though, was that she always brought home books for me to read and learn how to write. I can still remember sitting in the daybed in the front room as my mom called my dad, who was still in the Philippines. I was maybe two or three years old, and it was nighttime. My mom would pick up the receiver with its long curly cord, spin the dial - (We had an-old school rotary phone. Damn. I wish I knew where it was!) - and talk in her native tongue. I would be lying in bed, with one of those workbooks with lined pages. It was a big, light, rectangular, book with a sky blue cover. There were letters to trace, and I carefully adjusted each straight line and squiggle as I listened to my mom, on the phone with my dad, giggle. Those were heady days, when I knew nothing but whatever I directly experienced.

By the time I was three and a half years old, I was scribbling away on dozens of sheets of loose leaf paper, doodling in boxes that I'd made on each page, and stapling the pages together to make them "catalogues." I'd go around the house asking my mother, grandmother, grandfather, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, if they wanted to order from my catalogue, and I wouldn't be deterred by hesitation. "Keep it with you!" I'd insist, my business savvy potent.

An hour later, I'd return and throw my hands up, exhasperated: "WELL?!"

I can still remember my father pointing to a picture and saying, "I want apples."

"No, Dad!" I'd screamed, taking the catalogue from him and turning a dozen pages. "These are the apples."

"Ooooh!" he'd said. "Of course they are!"

"Duh, Dad!" I shook my head, annoyed, then took out a small notepad and a smaller pencil to record the order. "How many do you want?"

I guess maybe my writing and my drawing hadn't coalesced yet into talents, but I'd definitely had the enrepreneurial spirit at three and a half years old. And I had moxy, too. Thinking back on that, I wonder where the shy wallflower of early elementary school came from, and when I peek into elementary school classrooms, I wonder which student most resembles me. I was bookish and quiet, I think. My memory fails me because it's full of the high-jinx and shenanigans that started in my 'tween years.

Anyway... Yeah. Third grade. Mrs. Wiland's classroom. The energetic (possibly high) visitor who taught us about creative writing.

His final and most time-consuming activity with us was the first creative writing exercise I remember doing. He had a stack of postcards, each with different pictures on the front. There were landscapes and still lifes, caricatures and cartoons, surrealist and Renaissance styles on those postcards. He was to blindly reach into a bag of these postcards, present us with one, and then wait for us to finish writing a story about the picture on its front.

Excited and conflicted about beginning the exercise, I waited with bated breath for my postcard. Then got it. Fuck. It was religious. And not just religious. But uber religious. An angel stood in front of a woman (the Virgin Mary?), its wings stretched out as light cascaded out of its backside and the rest of its crevices, it seemed to me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Religion has always been a strange and slightly touchy subject for me (one that I'll get into some other time), and I didn't know what to do with it. Then, suddenly, I did.

I don't still have the story I wrote that day, but it sticks out in my memory still. It was a first person narrative of an angel visiting a family, there were many gem stones in the story, and it had at least one really long word that started with "multi-" ("multi-colored", I think? "Multi-dimensional"?). It started something like: "Look! There, coming in from beyond the window! It is an angel, its multi-colored wings glistening. Look at the emerald green, the amethyst and citron and diamond-like hue of its wings!...."

Clearly, I'd spent too many hours perusing my mother's jewelry catalogues. But, anyway, that story is what did it for me. There had been many earlier indicators of my proclivity toward the written word, but after the class oohed and aahed and Mrs. Wiland looked at me with pride, I knew that I was hooked. This talent that I had for weaving tales - it gave people almost as much pleasure as it did me. And ever since then, I've been pursuing the ultimate high: writing something enduring which will always be a source of pride.


* = According to Susan J. Breen, author of Fiction Class, lots of writers get their epiphanies in the third grade.