My parents are renovating. They’ve had the same house for twenty-odd years, and in all that time I don’t think my old closet was ever cleaned, because when they emptied it for the renovation they found all my old notebooks. Mom made a stack of them in the living room, and today it was my job to “go through and see if there are any we can get rid of” which translates to “please get your junk out of my newly renovated closet”.

            As for the junk itself, some are diaries, some are journals kept for English class, some are plays – awful, drawn out dramas with titles like “The Fermentation: A Tragic Comedy in Six Acts” – and others are sketchbooks full of pencil drawings and pasted-in pictures from old magazines. There are also a few creative-writing assignments and class essays. The oldest of these papers is from 1985 (a novel in five sentences, titled “Tara The Tree”) and the most recent are from my first year of college (angst-filled diary with cartoons and many, many scribbled-out phone numbers in the margins).

            I thought we should build a bonfire, because I’m lazy, and also I think all these examples of horrid writing should be thoroughly destroyed. My mother, who is not lazy, prefers recycling: just because I used up all that looseleaf, she argues, is no reason to waste it. Plus there might be something important in there.

            So I decided to take one random page from each book and save it for my kids to laugh at. The rest (oh, poor, underappreciated fifth-grade penmanship exercises) got ripped up and tossed in the recycling. Once the bag was full and the spirals had gone in the garbage and all the little chads had been swept up, I sat down and looked through what was left. Here are some quotes to give you an idea of what I am left with:

 

Seventh-grade short story called Insatiabull [sic] Crocodile: The only reason Jessi knew so much about these guys was because they were her twin brothers.

 

Drawing of a princess in a beehive hairdo, puffed sleeves, and ankle-length pantaloons

 

Unfinished story circa 1993: Arliss almost gagged. She hated it when Fern got sensible. Herk raced into the room, carrying a rubber bone in his hand.

 

Unsent note to my sixth-grade best friend:  In science, what is the study of penguins? Penguinology?

 

Diary, circa 1992: As I saw him in the midst of his friends, I knew that I hated him, the jerk.

 

Middle page from a grade-school writing exercise: She was very hungry and wished she had not eaten her food quite so fast at the foot of the mountain.

 

Drawing of a tree with a monster coiled around it. The monster is natty in pink-and-green argyle and holds one claw aloft in a friendly gesture.

 

Story dated May 1987, the year I turned 8: Once there was an egg. It had been sitting there for 400 years. Then it cracked. Out came a thing. It played with a dolphin and a walrus and it made a house. It had dinner and supper. Then it went to bed and got up at 4:00. It played with a sea turtle. It made a hammock and relaxed. It took a nap. Then it made some boats and sailed to South America. The End. Note from a teacher: Good story, Ella.

 

Sorting through the flotsam from this Age of Encouragement was a weird experience – on one hand, I admire the child who wrote a ten-page novel illustrated with photocopies of bent paper clips, but on the other I also cringe a little when the paper clips fall in love and build their own treehouse before (in a fit of fourth-grade surrealism) pulling off all their arms and legs.

            It feels like an accomplishment, to go through so much crap, but it’s also a reminder of how hard it is to come to terms with one’s own childhood. Looking through the pages I saved reminds me of what a lonely child I was, and how important it was to me that I was going to be a Great Writer (who also Illustrated), and how much time and paper and ink I spent in pursuit of that shiny future. In the end, I kind of want to go back in time, take the looseleaf away from that pretentious, nearsighted, antisocial, loveable little kid, and send her to ballet class or something.