This is how we learned to be writers

Or, Forever Young Part 2

Note: You can find Forever Young Part 1 here

It’s taken me a few weeks to get back to writing this series, writing the first piece was an intense trip back to the past and I felt like I needed to refuel. During this time, I’ve also been working with a life coach and part of that journey has had me reaching back to the past, to figure out who I really am and what it is I value most.

When I was in high school I was a writer. That’s it, that’s who I was. I could think of nothing else I wanted to be and although I dabbled in other things, it was obvious that writing was my true talent. When I asked my friend Sunnie what she remembered about me back then, she wrote:

In High School- We did crazy things. I remember putting up the dissecting frogs Peta posters- We shared that locker- and wrote each other notes on offbeat material, which was fun. You wrote me a letter once on a barf bag from the airplane. You were always so creative- and inspired me to be more creative. I still have postcards you sent where you would glue one picture to another- like Marylin Monroe’s face in the middle of the coliseum.

Reading that made me smile because I remember it well. We had a notebook that we’d pass each other between classes; I spent far more time writing notes to Sunnie than I ever did learning chemistry or history. For some reason, this phrase stands out to me:

Life Sunnie, is not a John Hughes film!

I can’t remember the context but I can imagine myself so clearly, sitting in class feeling angsty and misunderstood and feeling the relief of putting words on paper. I remember our algebra and geometry teacher, Mr. Whitney and how serious he seemed to me, standing by the chalkboard filled with numbers and figures I could never make sense of. We did some exercise once making shapes with our compass and protractors. Something about angles, I’m still not clear on these things, and after I made my shapes, I colored them in, then drew a background and captioned it. He was not amused and from then on, I’d spend math class writing songs about him like this:

Hey! Mr. Whitney! Leave Tracy alone!

All in all you know your butt is

Still retaining it all!

Pretty much I hated school, there was never enough of what I liked and too much of stuff that made my head hurt. What I loved were the extracurriculars. Drama club, speech, newspaper. God, how I loved the school paper. It was called the Eagle’s Echo and I eventually became editor in chief. It amazes me to this day how much freedom my advisers gave me, sometimes it got me in a lot of hot water. Once, we published a story called “Men are Scum” which didn’t go over so well with half of the school’s population and as I was a card carrying member of PETA at the time, there was much editorializing about the evils of meat. I suppose I still do that on this blog, in a more subtle way. Sunnie said:

I knew you’d write- but I also knew that there was no newspaper or magazine that would give you the creative license that the Eagles’ Echo did!

Could you imagine what I’d done with a blog back then? I did experiment with making my own zines, but my parents objected to me running off more than five or so copies on our printer and my allowance wasn’t sufficient for photocopying, so distribution was limited.

I met one of my best friends in high school at journalism conference, not the same year I wrote about in my last post, but the year before. His name was Omar and he went to a different high school and we hit it off right away, as both of us had unfortunate hair and huge braces and a skewed sense of humor. I forgot to get his address, but at later that year I went to an arts workshop called Creative Connections and met one of his classmates and she passed my address on to him. Unfortunately, he was about to move back to the States but we started writing each other letters and became good friends. I’m not sure why, but one day I sent him a rambling love letter addressed “Dear Randolph” and signed it “Babette” and he instantly got it and wrote back to Babette as Randolph and we wove a story for them through the mail. We probably spent less than 8 hours together face to face, but off and on over the years, he’s been a lifeline to meand one of the reasons I’ve always held on to the dream of being a writer.

Those letters, and the letters I wrote to Sunnie and Mike and all of my other friends were my training in how to be a writer. I didn’t have a computer with internet access back then, hardly anyone did, so I’d write most of them longhand in my room after I was supposed to be asleep. Sometimes they’d run to 20 or 30 pages of me trying to make sense of the world and what it was like to be a young woman not quite ready to grow up. That was one of the blessings about being an army brat, you learned to love writing letters.

And the joy when my dad would come home and toss me an envelope! I’d run to my room and tear it open and just devour every word and then carry it with me for days. I learned how words could sustain me and give me strength. I learned to treasure language and appreciate what a gift it was to be able to use it to make and keep connections. And Sunnie was right, we did push each other to become more creative, to improvise, to feel the joy in saying “yes, and…”

There was a lot of darker moments for me back then, and I will write about them as I continue this series, but one thing you must remember is this picture of a girl sitting cross legged on her bed, with a binder on her lap, filling page after page with her thoughts and observations. What she is writing might be dark, there is a lot of confusion and uncertainty, but in that moment she is in her element, she’s in flow, she’s happy.

I’m not sure why, but whenever I’ve thought of writing this post this week, this song has popped into my head, so I’ll leave you with it. Part 3 will be coming soon.

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