Memory Lane

Being reunited with all my stuff that was in storage and living in an apartment that cannot possibly hold it all has provoked a lot of digging in boxes to see what things I can live without. In the process, I'm taking quite the trip down memory lane, not a little of it pertinent to my writing career. 
For example, this wonderful thing:
Of course I became a writer after receiving this ribbon! 
There's more to the story, of course. We got these in the sixth grade (and by "we" I mean the whole class) for putting a few pages of our own writing between laminated construction paper covers that were subsequently bound with those black plastic business spirals. While I was enchanted at receiving a physical object that so blatantly recognized my life's path and self-definition, I was confused and disturbed that everyone else got one, too. They weren't authors, I was.
Perhaps the Young Author program achieved its goal and inspired literacy in the children at my school. I will never know, because I was already all about reading and that summit of all intellectual activity, writing. Whether encouraged or discouraged, I would always have ended up here, making up stories and foisting them on unwitting readers.
But I have no doubt that the road was easier, being encouraged.