I've mentioned Hutch high school before, but they are a "vo-tech" school with about 350 students and a very strong teen-parenting program. Their daycare center and the curriculum for young mothers really gets them launched (in my opinion). I was cleaning up after the lunch-bomb went off in the commons and one of the daycare workers, a woman with a fabulous singing voice and a long-gray braid down her back, came wheeling through with a six pack of one-year-olds. They were in three rows of two in this specialized stroller gizmo. I kept cleaning and she wheeled around the corner. A little later and she showed up again, singing a different song, and now with five tots on board. I kept cleaning. Then she came around again, with four tots. Yup, she was still singing. I cleaned. Then three tots. Then I figured out what was happening. The next time I saw her round the corner she had two on board, and the one in the very front was about to keel forward onto her big head, she was so fast asleep. I looked up. "You're about to lose that one in the front." I said.
"Finally! She hates to nap."
I don't know this woman's name, but she said she was happy to see me again (I was there in October for a week.)
Also, though I knew one of my writing teachers from 1995 did some supplemental classes at Hutch, I wasn't prepared for how much it helped to see her "office"-- a door on the other side of the library with the embossed words "storage" and her name typed onto a piece of paper and taped just below. I thought she was God when I took classes from her when I was twenty. I thought writers were creatures that would receive accolades for being profound, for being sensitive, that, if they worked hard and were really smart, people would recognize them somehow. We are, so much more often than not, quiet people, in storage closets and basements, still writing because we just can't do anything else, nothing else flames in that particular way.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
It may not be that nothing else flames that way - it's just that writing doesn't typically require specialized equipment, usually... It can be done anywhere, anytime, for almost any length of time. Even in storage rooms while people watch from across the hall and wonder why there is a name quietly taped under the sign.
But you can't escape it, either - it is in you always, trying to get out. You cannot put your tools aside, ever.
Some of us are burned by other things, but we need shops and tools and time and other materials. Some of us want to quit our jobs and do nothing else. But we put our tools aside and pick them up again later, after...
Create, create, create!!! Make wonderful things and hope that people are going to look - hope they SEE - but don't wait for them to do it - just keep going and leave a trail for them to follow... If you hear shouting and cheering behind you, keep going. Just keep going.
Write me a bowl, I'll turn you a paragraph...
Post a Comment