I am at this very moment on the tenth floor of the Seattle Public Library. This space is called the Reading Room and it is equipped with comfortable seating, generous desks, electrical outlets and wireless internet service. The reading room is in the tippy-top of the library’s “pyramid”. In every direction–including straight up–lie diamond-patterned windows that reveal rain-streaked buildings and today’s gray Seattle sky. It is pretty cool place to be writing this update.
I spent the morning at Spanaway Elementary School in Spanaway, Washington. Ms. Beverly Estrada welcomed me into her 5/6 grade classroom. What a great group of kids! They were the perfect audience: attentive, absorbed, and they laughed at my silly jokes. One darling young lady even raised her hand and whispered, “You’re talking a little fast!” about five minutes into my presentation. I was, indeed, a bit nervy. When I get nervy, I talk fast. Her advice was just exactly what I needed to hear. What else could I do but giggle self-conciously and, well, slow down? I checked in with this young lady several slides later to see if I was doing better and she gave me a hearty thumbs up. The rest of the talk was smooth sailing.
The surprise of the morning came after I showed the children a story I had written as a child. It is, in fact, the only story I wrote as a kid that has survived my compulsive tendencies to organize and pare down my boxes of stuff. Somewhere along the way my stories got canned and these three stapled and badly yellowed pages—hand-typed on the electric typewriter I got for Christmas the year I turned twelve—are all that is left of my early creative efforts.
“Never, ever, ever throw away your stories,” I told my audience. “Even if you read them in six months, or two years, or ten years, and decide they are awful. Even if you decide the moment they are finished that they are awful. Tuck them away in a drawer and save them forever.”
And when they asked why, as I knew they would, I told them that this old story is the truest glimpse I have into my twelve-year old self. I told them it is the story of a girl named Lexi whose parents are considering moving her grandfather into a nursing home. I created Lexi and her brave story–she manages to keep her grandfather out of the nursing home–because my own great-grandfather had become very old and frail and was needing a lot of care, perhaps more than our family could give him. The decisions about my great-grandfather’s fate, however, were out of my hands. Unlike Lexi, no one asked me what I thought we should do for him. And so I created a world where the heroine, a twelve-year-old girl like me, saved the day. Lexi’s story is made up, but the feelings I had when I was twelve and my great-grandfather was dying … those are all right there in the story. And I don’t think I would remember them today if I didn’t have this story to read.
The kids were great. They admitted to throwing stories away all the time, but in the next breath they agreed they would start to save them. They seemed to get what I was saying, and this made me happy. I went on with my talk, answered all their questions, and had started to wrap things up when a young man in the back of the room raised his hand.
“Would you read us your story before you go?” he asked.
At first I thought he meant he wanted me to read my book, TRACKING TRASH. “Your teacher is keeping a copy of the book in your classroom,” I assured him. “There will be plenty of time for you all to read it when I am gone. Plus, its kind of a long book!”
“No,’ he said. “I mean the story you wrote when you were a kid. Like us.”
I was caught off guard. Read my story? The story I wrote when I was twelve? Here? Now?
“Um. Well. Gee. I don’t think we have time?” I looked at Ms. Estrada for help. She smiled knowingly (this is a woman who knows a teaching moment when she sees one) and told me we had plenty of time, that I should go ahead and read it.
And so I read to the class a short story I wrote twenty-five years ago. It is not a story I intended to read today (or ever, really), but those fabulous Spanaways cheered and clapped when I was done. They liked the piece and told me they were glad I had saved it. And I am fairly certain they will be saving their own stories from now on, too.
