Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Blast from the Past


I was going through some boxes in the basement and found my writing binder from when I was eight and nine years old. I remembered it was there but I had totally forgotten what was inside – I wrote several “novels” -- and even illustrated them myself!—kept together by an Animal Crackers binder that was ever so popular in 1982.


I wrote what I knew – there are references to Acapulco (where we holidayed every year) and great reverence for the Duke boys (of whom I was a huge fan). Characters were named after my friends at the time and were interested in the things we were into – baseball, reading Nancy Drew books, making up dance routines and songs to present at our talent shows. It’s like a subjective time capsule; it speaks to a slice of time but through the lens of a prepubescent girl in Calgary.

It was great to flip through these stories and read about what my young brain thought was interesting enough to put pencil to paper to record. Sure, it’s riddled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but I’ve seen worse writing on the Internet so I suppose I should cut myself some slack.

The best part of this whole discovery is how interested Carmen is in what I wrote. She’s the same age now as I was then, so maybe what I wrote really speaks to someone that age. Or maybe she’s just enjoying exploring a piece of her mom that she didn’t know about before. And maybe it’ll spur her to write her own stories and use her imagination to create something that her kids will flip through in 30 years and say, “Wow, that’s pretty cool, Mom.” If nothing else it has reminded me of how much I have always loved to write and how important it is to get serious about putting the stories in my head down on paper. So thanks to the nine-year-old me for the kick in the pants. Message received.