I began my life with verse in the third grade with an ode to Dorothy Glover’s thick legs. In our gym class dodge ball variations, their slow grace struck me as the stuff of solidity and strength. Dorothy was a redwood, and we were all saplings in comparison. And when she pegged someone…my gosh, he fell right over. Playful with whimsy, I composed, in pentametric couplets, a poem one evening. It was on that yellow Peterson paper that we were all made to use, with double line-heights and dashed midlines for our lesser loops, and it took up a full page. Of course I don’t have the poem and I can’t recall it (just as well; I was eight), but what has stayed with me is its ease of composition and the warmth that writing it gave me.
Before sharing it with anyone in class (not even Danny Whitman and Jack Timco, who are, to this date, the most easily-amused people I’ve ever met, especially when cruelties are concerned), I followed up the next night with a cycle of Limericks on Timothy Witting’s pudgy, pasty, and pale face. Again, the words came easily, as if my pencil itself were inspired, and I couldn’t help but smile, not at my own cleverness but at the joy of writing.
I showed the Dorothy poem to a few friends that next day, and they liked it as much as I had, maybe more, and copied it. It spread through the three classes in my grade and gave me some reputation, welcome of course, as a troublemaker. But even the teachers couldn’t help but be amused as they admonished me to take others’ feelings to heart.
I never showed anyone the Timothy poem. Tim was more popular than Dorothy, to be sure; he was well liked and an endearing if dunce-like class clown. But popularity didn’t have anything to do with my new shyness. Of my two poems, Tim’s was the one that I admired more. I worried, though, that I couldn’t follow the success of the Dorothy poem and, even if I were to, what would be expected of me then? In the third grade, I became a silent victim of my own (important! everything is important at eight) success. What little I did write for pleasure, I kept to myself.
And now I’m sitting at a Starbucks staring down the deadline of my first weekly column. I pushed it out of my mind all weekend, when I ought to have been writing it or thinking about it or something. For years and years, I’ve read newspapers and magazines and thought to myself that I could do this kind of thing and cultivated that very attitude within myself. Now it’s time to put up or shut up.
I think I can do what needs to be done. The smallest doubts are what keep me nervous and distracted. I know that’s why I’m typing here and not in Word. If I can’t do it, if I strike out, it’s going to be a big change.
But I set a deadline and shared it with other people (not least of which, my editor). I’m decided. I need to know.