At this time every year I take part in an online journaling competition. We're given a weekly prompt, we write, we publish online, and our fellow competitors -- as well as the greater journal community -- comment and eventually vote on our pieces.
This past week's prompt was "Tribute", and, more important, a tribute to those people who guided your development in reading, writing, and/or creating. Reading my fellow competitors' entries has been a joy in that it's not always parents who plant certain seeds and/or nurture what's already inborn. In my case, it definitely was my parents. They're both gone now. Why has it taken so long for me to realize just how much they both gifted me?
What's the earliest memory of your father?
He read anything and everything. Bookcases everywhere in our apartment, books on the nightstand, in the bathroom, our local paper, the New York Times, and The Sporting News carefully creased and folded on the kitchen table, books hidden underneath the front seats of his car.
He had a lot of books about something called World War II and a series of books written by somebody called Winston Churchill. After dinner and after he did what I called "desk work", he retired to his chair in the living room with one of these books. I snuggled next to him. "Whatcha reading, Daddy? Can you read to me?"
I think my mother introduced me to the Golden Book series after discovering he told me about a very bad man named Hitler.
My father upped the ante by buying me a set of encyclopedias -- the grown up version and the kids' version. The kids' version had photos. I'd pick out a very long word and ask him to read everything about it to me.
What about the typewriter?
My mother had a portable green Smith-Corona manual typewriter. It usually sat in its tan-colored case in the hall closet. Every so often she took it out, set it on the kitchen table, and typed out important-looking papers, sometimes with black carbon paper sandwiched in between two sheets. She had to adjust the roller so they'd fit. I watched her change the ribbon and unstick stubborn keys. I loved listening to the clickey-clack, the dinging bell, and the ziiiip when she pushed the carriage return.
Sometimes she let me play with it. She showed me how to roll in a sheet of paper, which fingers to place on which keys, how to use the slider to make margins. My fingers, of course, were too small to really type, so I used the one-finger-hunt-and-peck method.
She eventually gifted me the typewriter because it was obvious I favored it over any other toy or doll I had.
When did you put one and one together?
That's just it -- I don't know because the reading and typing -- which equaled the storytelling -- just somehow came together. I suppose there must have been one day, maybe when I was in elementary school, where I typed out a small story. That small story begat another, which begat even a longer story, which eventually begat what I called "My First Novel", some twenty pages folded like a book. I wrote another "novel". I wrote what I called "magazine articles", usually about a girl who looked exactly like me doing extraordinary things.
I loved writing more than playing with the neighborhood kids, to tell you the truth. I passed many a hot summer afternoon in the cool of our dining room with fluttering paper and the clickety-clack of the Smith-Corona. My imagination, to me, was much more interesting than real life. What my parents couldn't understand was why I made my stories so totally unbelievable and too "adult". Why can't I write about the bad person who killed the good person like I saw on the news last night?
As my father said, "I don't know much about writing, but I do know that writers write what they know."
The ironic part about all this is that neither of my parents were from particularly literate families. And perhaps, because of that, they both constantly thirsted for knowledge, a trait they certainly passed onto me.
One voracious reader plus a typewriter equals me.