This post is my reply to all the wonderful comments you left me on my last post "In the Beginning." Your memories and your thoughts about this subject are so perfect that I felt each comment needed to stand by itself. Even my husband added a memory of his own about "The Missing Chrome Pencil."
Your insights into what makes each of us begin to become ourselves are so thoughtful, and tender, and touching beyond words. I thank each one of you for taking the time to put into words something that is not easy to put into words.
Your comments made me realize that not everyone is struck with the sense of destiny that pounced on me when I was only nine years old. In retrospect, I wish I had not been so thunderstruck with this thought that I was going to be a writer. It has driven me my whole life to work in the wee hours of the night when I should have been sleeping.
My paper girl wanted the pen from my header, so I (reluctantly) gave it to her, and you can see she is somewhat weighed down by it. Is she going to want to become a writer, too? I can't tell if she is trying to write, however. It looks more as if she were plowing.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a writer. The problem is that if you think you should write, you are driven to publish. If you have the good fortune to publish one book, you must publish a second one. If you publish a second book, you must publish a third. There is no rest for you. You must go on and on. Publish or perish, indeed.
But I have finally rebelled against my own fate. How wonderful that this little blog lets me write and publish as I please so that I can spend the rest of my time not writing!!
Oh good! There she goes with a stack of books to read. Let her curl up with words that someone else has written.
When I was nine and decided to become a writer, I was spending the summer with my grandmother. In the evenings an aunt and uncle always came for supper, and after supper we four played games at a cardtable in front of the fireplace where summer flowers were kept instead of a winter fire.
We played Clue, Go-Fishing, Old Maid, and Authors. Authors is a card game featuring thirteen authors with four cards for each author showing the titles of four different books. The idea was get all four Mark Twain cards or all four Hawthorne cards, etc., to make sets. The person with the most sets won the game.
I wonder now if playing Authors during the whole of that fateful summer triggered the dangerous idea in my head that I too would be an author and write books. Perhaps this card game should be required to have a warning label printed on the back.
Well, we can only live one childhood and one life and I cannot go back and change mine now, but I do want to let go of feeling that I must become one thing or another.
I would like to just be.
Oh better still! My paper girl has given up both writing and books, and is busy making a bicycle with rabbit.
I feel so indescribably happy for her. I thought I could put this into words, and I find that I can't. But maybe becoming and being are one and the same?
She will need some handlebars. She might want a basket, too. I think I will set the bigger questions of the universe aside for now and go and see if she wants some help. . .
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