It's Alright, Ma, I'm Only Writing

I can still remember it as though it happened only yesterday.

I must have been around 13. My parents bought me an antique desk for my bedroom. I dusted its wrought iron legs and shiny, slanted writing surface. On the book shelf that was part of this desk, I gently placed my treasured books: Little House on the Prairie, Dr. Doolittle, Little Women, Bartlett’s Quotations, Famous Poems Old and New, Mud Pies and Other Recipes.

Many a homework assignment was completed at that desk, and I fumbled at writing my first poems there, too, hiding them in my homework papers if someone should come into my room. Having this great desk to write at was partially to blame for my dream of being a poet. The librarian at our town library had also been saving biographies of poets for me. I’d read about Sara Teasdale and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but the book about Sylvia Plath convinced me of two things: I could be a poet and the mood swings my mother experienced weren’t a novelty after all.

Then came the evening I coughed up the courage to tell my parents that I wanted to be a poet. We’d been discussing my high school class schedule, so it seemed a good a time as any. I’d already been accepted in the Advanced English class, one focusing on literature and writing. I figured all I needed was four years of French to assist me in ordering food at the cafes I’d be visiting on the Left Bank and I could skip Biology and Geometry. I paced my bedroom practicing the presentation I would give at the dinner table, until I was absolutely certain I had chosen my words so perfectly that no one could argue with the fact that I must follow my dream. I could stop hiding all the poems I was writing, start wearing a black beret, maybe smoke a cigarette or two….

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous! You’d never be able to feed yourself. You’re going to take a typing class.”

And there it was. My first review. My first critic. The same one that haunts me each and every time I slip a manuscript into an envelope to send out, every time I stand in front of a room full of people to give a reading. It never goes away. Partly because of the ring of truth within those words: I would never have been able to feed myself – literally – with poetry, although I have definitely fed myself spiritually. I don’t think this is something my parents would have been able to understand, though.

I am very, very thankful for one thing, however. I did, indeed, learn to type. And I have earned a very good living in the past because I knew how to type. BUT…..I’ve also been able to write more efficiently because I can type 80+ words a minute. I thank my folks, both gone now and unable to experience the poems that get published here and there, for making sure that I learned how to type.