Assignment 1

Since it seems like forever since I posted and wasnt' sure which draft to ressurect and as it was going to be much too hard to condense all of the recent happenings into a post, I decided to post my 1st creastive writing assigment from over at Just Write, Edie is the bestest writing teacher a girl ever had. Now please be gentle with me.


Children

—As a child I learned that it was better to be seen than heard. Why then was it such a surprise that I turned out to be so shy? At age nine I had asked to play the piano, not to be an entertainer or trained monkey- asked to perform on command. I had asked because I loved music, specifically rock n roll. I had the biggest collection of 45’s of any six year old that I knew - Martha and the Vandells, the Supremes, the Temptations. Motown reigned supreme.

It didn’t matter who was in the house or for what reason, my mother would invariable ask me to entertain them and most times I would outright refuse, despite of or because of her persistent cajoling, “Oh come on honey just play a little bit of Moon River for Mr. Lewis” – their insurance salesman. Sometimes she would stoop to outright bribery – “I’ll give you a dime for the candy store later”. Hmm, a dime could buy my favorite – a Milky Way and some of those wax lips I liked or maybe even a roll of the paper dots. I never could quite get the appeal of those dots, since more often than not, you would wind up eating some of the paper that they came on.

I can just remember the first time that I heard that children should be heard not seen. It was in a variety or five & dime store and some terse store clerk muttered it to a lady she was helping (it might even had been my mother). But it wasn’t til some 30 years later that I would learn that just the opposite could be true as well; maybe it was better to seen than heard.

When my son was maybe three or four I made the mistake of taking him shopping with me one day to a Nursery where they also had an indoor shop with gardening tools, pottery and knick knacky things. When the inevitable crash came I knew it came from my irreplaceable darling boy. When we were asked to leave in no uncertain terms, I scooped up my denim clad, blond, curly-haired son ,kissed his head and breathed in his delicious smell as we fled the scene of the crime.