How I learned to write "good" pt.1

When I was a young and still running around the mean streets of New Haven in my favorite green, Velcro, Incredible Hulk tennis shoes, I was a very happy kid. I had red hair and freckles for a while, but they eventually wore off and gave way to the dirty-blond hair and the pale, Scottish-Pollock skin that I still sport proudly today. I read Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books by the dozen, and drew or traced every superhero, villain, warrior, and monster that I encountered. I am told that I was a “self-actualizing” child, and that this was a good thing. I’ve recently come to realize, however, that only-children tend to be that way out of necessity.

I was so “well adjusted,” in fact, that my parents decided to get me the hell out of the house one year early, and tossed my skinny little ass onto the school buss at age 5. My first day of kindergarten was a huge success. I got off the bus, took one look at all of the strange kids filing into the front doors of Seifert Elementary, and immediately decided that it just wasn’t for me. So, I did what any kid would do in that situation, I clutched tightly onto my Star Wars lunch box (yes, the kind with the thermos) and made a break for it. I ran at top-speed across the front lawn of the school, and eventually took shelter behind a giant pine tree. I’m sure the pine tree only looked GIANT to me because I was about 3-feet tall at the time, but I do remember that it provided excellent cover for my stealthy escape operation. It took a while, but someone eventually blew my cover, and they found me. So began my colored educational career.

To say that my hatred for writing began a young age would be equivalent to saying that the surface of the Sun is a bit on the warm side; it was a slight understatement. I hated everything about it. I hated pencils because I hated those messy eraser shavings. I hated lined paper because it got in the way of my drawings. I hated letters because there were just too damn many of them, and putting them in the correct order to form words seemed way too difficult. Oh, and my handwriting was a friggin nightmare. In fact, it was so bad, that my dad actually made me hand-copy entire chapters from my Wizards and Warriors books, one letter at a time, to practice (I came across that writing in an old box a few weeks ago and… WOW was it horrid).

Eventually, I did give in to the system (and my father), and I learned to spell and write somewhat legibly. The big breakthrough, and I remember the moment as if it were yesterday, was in the first grade. I had to spell a series of words, and this really pissed me off because the words were big. I complained and stated my intentions to give up. After all, spelling “together” was a daunting task for any 6-year-old. In that moment, Mrs. Arf looked at me with her calming, patient eyes and simply said, “to, get, her.” The light-bulb went on inside my dense, adolescent brain, and spelling has never been an issue for me since. Mrs. Arf was, quite simply, the BOMB.

To be continued...