Creative Writing Assignment

It's a practice memoir. It's just supposed to be as "concrete" as possible. And you don't have to read it, by the way. I just finally finished typing the thing and was frustrated at the thought that no one was going to read it. (My teacher says it's just a length assignment, and he probably will only read a couple of the class's essays.) So feel free, but don't feel obligated.

Ahem.

When I was six years old and barely taller than the weeds that grew in my backyard, I was in my first year of school at Brookside Elementary. My hair was a shimmering baby-blond back then, and wispy, as if each strand were made of a delicate gossamer thread. I had bright, wide eyes of the truest blue, and my smile was pock-marked with the holes that were the only evidence of the Tooth Fairy’s visits. I had ears that stuck out and were too large for my small head, making me appear slightly off-balance.

Another interesting point. I had a complexion problem akin to Rudolph the Reindeer. I had allergies, and every day as I ran about the playground with my fellow Kindergarteners, tiny troops of little pollen soldiers would amass in the air around me – sensing weakness – and infiltrate my body through my olfactory passages, seeking to disrupt my body’s internal command structure. But, at six, I didn’t know that. I only knew that my nose itched. And so I rubbed it, constantly. In most of the photographic evidence of my Kindergarten years, I can be identified as the child with the big ears and the red nose.

That was the time when I wore dresses to school everyday and didn’t think to care. I was never the kind of girl who worried about dirtying her nails or who threw tea parties for her stuffed animal friends. I played in the mud, challenged boys to races, and always had bruises or skinned knees from one of my many adventures. But in this day, the innocent day of a mid-90s childhood, dresses never seemed contradictory to my personality. I could run in a knee-high skirt just as well as in a pair of pants, and as long as I took care never to find myself upside-down I might as well be in dress.

Oh, how I raved about my dresses! I was the first Kindergartener my mother had ever had. This was a new and exciting game for her, one she was eager to play, and she seemed intent on dressing me up to be a perfect paper doll. My dresses were varied and spectacular, every one of them: one with black and white stripes, off-set with huge, brightly-colored pockets and great big buttons – orange, purple, yellow, green, blue, red, orange, purple . . . – that ran down the front of it; a frail grey dress with soft pink edging and a drop-waist that hit several inches down my thigh; and, of course, the obligatory sailor’s dress, complete with collar, a little anchor sewn on the pocket, and ever more buttons. I adored each of those dresses and – as was my custom with beloved items – wore most of them to rags.

In Kindergarten, you sit on the floor, because those teachers are smart enough to know that no self-respecting six-year-old will admit subservience to a chair for any length of time. In my class, we had one big mat laid out on the floor before the chalkboard, marked with four rows of colored tape. The lines of tape were labeled, at careful distances, with the names of the students. Six or seven kids to a row, we all sat down right on top of our names, proudly exclaiming to the other students, “I’m in the PINK row!” (Which – incidentally – I was.) The pink row was second from the front, and I sat on that row, near the right edge of the mat, beside a boy named Judd Moesinger. But the important thing was that I was merely feet from the seat of authority: the teacher’s stool.

My teacher struggled sometimes with the decision of whether to be pleased or annoyed with me. Pleased because I had come to Kindergarten fully prepared; when we took our first test – excuse me, assessment – at the beginning of the year, I raced through my pronunciation of the alphabet, wrote only two of my letters backwards, and when asked to count as high as I could go, was eventually stopped by my patient teacher after I reached 193. Annoyed, however, because I was not content to let my prodigious brilliance go unrecognized.

I do not know how or when a child learns to raise his hand to get notice from a teacher, but I do know that I was exceptionally gifted in this skill. My skinny little arm could flash upward at such an alarming rate as to make the children surrounding me flinch backwards, afraid that, if I hit them, their face would fly off. I would put so much effort into throwing that arm into the air that I used to rock my entire body when I raised my hand. I sat leaning forward, waiting for the chance to say something ingenious, and often found occasion to do so. My teacher put up with this for several weeks before I was politely asked to let the other children answer once in a while.

Other children? I was barely conscious of them. Kindergarten was my time, my chance to explore the limits of fun, to shine in my intelligence, to be extraordinary. Judd Moesinger was important only because he sat next to me, the center of the galaxy.

Even now, the only thing I remember about any of the other kids is that, once, a boy with dark lanky hair and thick glasses – with a string tied around them so they couldn’t fall off his squishy face – brought in his pet hermit crab and let it skitter around on the desk with its little red legs. The creature fascinated me: alone in a shell, ignorant of the rest of the world, focused only on his own tasks and his own fulfillment. Perhaps that’s why I remember the hermit crab.

Because he was so much like me.