Nostalgic Prowl Through the Filing Cabinet

I've been thinking about an upcoming speech I have to give at the Women's Club here in town on February 1st. I really am not comfortable talking in front of groups of people, nor am I all the comfortable about talking about myself (I still post far less than any other human being on facebook although I've been making efforts in that area.)

Today I was thinking about my writing roots. I have a four drawer filing cabinet dating from the 1990's all the way back to maybe middle school.

In High school I wrote a lot of poetry and short prose pieces. I also began exploring satire and loved that! I have a lot of papers in a file with As on them from various English classes where I did creative writing, the pride of the lot being one where a story I wrote called Richard was read, reviewed and given a grade by my peers. Everyone gave me an A- and that wasn't a very pleasant story because it was about a father holding his son back, making him stay home and take care of the farm, not allowing Richard to have a life of his own...

I found a book I put together using pictures from The Wizard of Oz when I worked in the molding hall at LEGO on the night shift. Each picture was mounted on a piece of different colored construction paper. Each character represented myself and the guys I worked with at the time (Ken, Chris, Roy, Dan). I created speech bubbles and wrote in dialogue to match what happened during the night shift to the character's facial expressions and body positions in the pictures. Ken helped with the dialogue when I couldn't think of something humorous. We had a lot of fun and laughed ourselves sick the night I brought the finished "book" in to share with my co-workers.

I did something similar when I worked as a campus police officer. I put out a quarterly satiric "Bulletin" complete with articles, pictures, and artwork lampooning myself and my practically all male fellow officers and supervisors. I have a keen sense of humor and could write really outrageous, funny things about our exploits. I thought for sure I'd be fired when our chief got a hold of one of the copies. I got called into his office with the door closed...spoken to, but he admitted I was good for department morale and okayed my continuing to write the Bulletin as long as I didn't put anyone else into my articles, such as the college president, the deans, professors or students. I didn't need to do that because I had more than enough material with all three shifts in the department. Everyone anticipated the next quarterly issue and the few copies were passed around and well taken care of. I have all the originals in my filing cabinet still-and was practically rolling on the floor laughing this morning as I reread certain articles.

I also found a notebook I wrote in throughout college- a lot of poetry and short prose. I continued to write poetry after I got married in 1984. There's also some artwork on the pages.

I have stuff I wrote about a rock group I created- I wrote about them a lot but didn't know how to actually write a novel back then although some of the stories are novella length or longer.

The jewel I discovered was a story called The Obnoxious Santa written around 1985 that had me laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. Obnoxious Santa pre-dates Bad Santa by several decades- but he was a gem! Bangs on the door waking the kids who have to come downstairs and let him in. He's grungy and rude, drops his sack in the hall and heads right to the kitchen complaining the cookies and milk aren't enough. He devours ham and sweet potatoes, then digs into the special mince meat pie the mother has made for company. He then dumps the gifts out and they're unwrapped, used toys and clothing. When they complain he points out they didn't specify they wanted new stuff, then adds that all they do is tear the wrapping paper and ribbons off so what's the point of spending time wrapping them if they're just going to rip into them like that? Well, I think this is actually the first Christmas story I ever wrote! It was fun reading it, thinking about where I was in my life at that time (married for a year, not yet a mother as that wouldn't happen until 1991), living in the haunted house (we moved in 1989), working as a campus police officer/supervisor (82-88).

Some stories were written during the night shift at the college. One of my fellow officers was Irish and we'd drive around between 2AM and 5AM telling one another ghost stories every chance we got. The Chase and I Am Here were two of the stories that came from those ghost story cruiser rides around campus.

I rediscovered where I came from as a writer- or at least as far back as I could go with what's in the filing cabinets upstairs. There's stuff going back to elementary school in the cellar I should probably salvage for the archives. I think the oldest thing I still have is a fourth grade story called The Fantasmagorical Gadget. I remember having to get up in front of the class and read it- I was mortified because I hate public speaking and was painfully shy back then, but the teacher, Mrs. Green, loved the story of time traveling back to Revolutionary War times to bring a discouraged and cold General George Washington at Valley Forge a plate of my Mom's hot chocolate chip cookies which cheered him immensely. What 4th grader writes stuff like that? I even illustrated it.

I've always been able to write. I've always loved reading and writing. I love listening to people tell stories aloud. It's just who I am, not what I am. I do not separate the two. I am a writer.