Eye Contact And Pizza Bagels
A simple 2nd grade assignment taught me how to send my words out into the world when it was too difficult to go out myself.
I wish I’d saved that essay. Most likely it was written on that specially lined handwriting practice paper and definitely with a №2 pencil. I knew it was good. I knew it was not what Mrs. Kelly was expecting. I knew the other second graders were groaning through this exercise while I was nearly crying happy tears of excitement. As the words appeared in my brain, I carefully wrote them down on the mix of solid and dotted lines.
“Write about an object. Any object. You have 30 minutes.”
I wrote about my pencil. Beginning with a vague description, I wanted the reader to be drawn in. I wanted my essay to make this №2 pencil the sexiest pencil alive without even knowing what sexy was at eight-years-old.
The next day, my mother was grinning that proud mother grin when I went home for my pizza bagel lunch.
“Mrs. Kelly called me this morning. She told me you wrote an essay about your pencil?!” she said as she put down my bottle of Yoo-hoo. It was 1978.
“I did! It was so fun!!” as I went back to wolfing down my pizza bagel in my hour-long lunchbreak from elementary school.
As my mother told me how much Mrs. Kelly loved my work, my mother looked me in the eye and said, “You have a talent. Keep going.”
In 8th grade, Luke, Laura, and General Hospital ruled the world. For me, it wasn’t enough to just watch the storylines unfold. I needed to be in the story. So I wrote it. I wrote myself into the espionage and love and vengeance and all of it. And when I brought my notebook and pen to my junior high lunchroom table, word began to spread.
The numbered pages were passed around like wildfire. Kids who normally wouldn’t be caught dead talking to geeky me suddenly showed curiosity. They politely asked to be written into the story too.
I went home and wrote them into the evolving story. As they excitedly scanned the pages and laughed and smiled at seeing their names, I felt all the feelings. I felt loved. I felt a sense of satisfaction like I’d never felt before. I felt this gift that Mrs. Kelly had told my mother about six years earlier.
My writing veered off into teenage angst prose and then into letters and lists to myself. The message of the “starving writer” was consistent and loud so writing never even was considered as a career option for me.
But in 2010, something so beyond comprehension happened. Small amounts of writing, even just a sentence fragment, became my only possible chance at words to express the inexpressible. My not quite two-year-old son Noah died in a swimming pool accident.
I wrote to my son. I wrote to God. I wrote to myself. But it took many years for the words to coherently string together as if by magic. This is where that initial love affair with words came to my rescue. When I was too weak with grief to even leave my bed, I could still send my words out into the world in my place.
And I created a new sort of eight-grade lunch table. Instead of General Hospital storylines, I wrote for the grieving parent who couldn’t quite find the right words to express this highly nuanced pain. And as the private messages came in from around the world from “my mothers” as I call them, I knew that I was here to write.
My teacher, Mrs. Kelly, is long gone and so is my mother. But never underestimate some serious eye contact filled encouragement served alongside a pizza bagel and Yoo-hoo.
