Fairy Tales and the Lonely Child

For a second blog post, I suggested to writers that they consider a significant moment in their histories as writers. Where were you? What happened? Who, if anyone, helped you in this moment? What did you learn/realize/otherwise discover?

As an instructor and even more as a parent, I'm often struck by how difficult it is to follow my own advice, or to complete my own homework. That said, here goes.

When I review my "history" as a writer, the moment that snags in my mind most often occurs in Falk School, in Pittsburgh, PA, in the first semester of my third grade year.

Okay, here I will make a confession: I can't remember, honestly, when in the year it took place. Only that my desk didn't face a window, and so the quality of light in the memory is golden, spring-like ... which could be an effect of the florescent lights, or of the corruption, in general, of any memory that is 44 years old.

So. I'm sitting at my desk, which happens to be in the aisle facing a row of carrels. I'm writing an illustrated story about Nancy Tupperware and her magical red shoes. Nancy puts on these shoes and they allow her to fly wherever she wants to fly in the world. She uses them on Christmas eve to fly to ... memory lapse ... England? ... and there she meets with animals in a manger (THE manger? Interesting/rogue religious moment in the agnostic kid's life) who can now, since it's Christmas eve, talk to her. The conversation -- its import and substance -- has been lost, though the "fact" (sorry, couldn't resist the scare quotes OR this pretentious aside) of that conversation, animals to Nancy, remains. Then, to end the story, Nancy flies up to heaven to converse with angels.

(This probably means that I was writing this in November or early December, in anticipation of Christmas.)

I am writing this story in order to share it with my friends. My best friend, Madeline Schwartz, is back now after spending second grade with her family in France. Maybe I'm writing this story in order to capture Madeline's attention, to win her back. As I color in the magnificent vibrance of Nancy's electric red shoes, I'm thinking of Madeline and her deep brown eyes, her wavy dark hair, her delicate olive skin. I want her to like this story. I want her to think it's a wonderful story, a magical tale. I want her to admire me as much as I admire her and the mysterious, fabulous "fact" of her new ability to speak French.

I can't remember if Madeline liked the story -- or if she ever read it. I do remember that after third grade we moved to Louisiana for a year and that marked the end of my friendship with Madeline. When we came back, I don't remember her in my fifth grade class. She took up ballet and I played the piano. She stayed at Falk and my parents shipped me off to the public middle school. We reconnected briefly when we were both in separate colleges, but she said, once, while going somewhere with me and my mother, "Laurie, you have the same stupid sense of humor you had in the first grade." And that I mark as the end of it all. No flying shoes, no talking animals.

Perhaps this tidbit of memory, which still has the power to shame me, survives to remind me that Nancy's magic was reserved just for me. The notion of flying, of speaking to animals and angels, of crossing barriers and expanding connection through conversation, movement, magic -- all of these are achieved through poetry and story. But especially story.

I think what I've learned, looking back on myself, hunched over my desk writing that story, drawing in Nancy and her shoes (and her billowing dress, like a mushroom umbrella in the lined sky, bobbing over the crooked manger below), lovingly laboring over those red shoes, is that I was a lonely child who found a gorgeous and busy life in books. There was nothing I enjoyed as much as losing myself to a fictional world -- fairy tales, the house at Pooh Corner, the wizard of Oz and the oddball hybrid characters (all of them infused with magic). I could forget about my desk in the walkway, my accomplished French speaking friends whose invisibility still lingers in my memory like a careful erasure, my forbidding (step)father, and the palpable feeling of uncertainty and fear that stalked me in my own house.

The story I was living at the time, my reality, was both boring and repressive. I certainly experienced joy, I won't lie. But most of that joy -- if it happened in my "real-life" narrative -- was both temporary and tenuous. The joy I experienced while reading and writing was enormous, and life-giving, and a balm to the solitary child bent over her notebook at the battered desk. It wrapped that child up in a warm sunshiny light, and allowed her to fly to far off lands, the author of her destiny and her destinations.