Once Upon a Time: True Stories of an Aspiring Writer

8: Tire Swings, Talking Smoothies, and Techno Babble

I SPENT LOTS OF TIME creating stories as a kid.

When it was summer, I loved sitting on our basement computer and typing up stories. One of my favorites was called "My Cat Named Daisy," a story about a girl's talking cat who causes mischief for her. I based it on what I thought my actual cat's personality would be like. My first experience getting plagiarized was when Kelly wrote her own similar story, called "My Dog Named Brittany." This infuriated me to no end!

And then something happened that prompted more storytelling: Christine returning to school.

In first grade, when we first met,  we had spent time writing stories about Winnie the Pooh and those creepy Furbies. Pooh Bear would usually be off to a mythical Cave of Dragons because, for some unknown reason, he had to defeat it. Piglet helped him out by sending him tips along the way that somehow magically floated their way down to wherever Pooh was. Sometimes Pooh would also stay overnight with a family of other bears, go to school, or have to do a rushed dragon-defeating mission because he had to get back for Rabbit's birthday party. 

As for the Furbies, Christine had boxes of them that didn't seem at all creepy to us at the time. One day, she began a story called "My Dream." She told me that she had had a dream about Furby interactions the night before, and decided to write it down. I questioned that logic immediately. How would anyone remember an entire story without playing a role in the dream themselves? But from then on, our Furby stories were entitled, "My Dream."

At the end of the day when we listened to Harry Potter on tape, Christine and I would whip out our notepads and write during that time, until our teacher banned it. These stories were usually written on yellow legal pads, though we had other notebooks as well. Alas, my copy of "Pooh and the Dragon," the first story I ever completed, has pretty much disappeared from existence. So has "The Furby Who Came To Furbyland," about a Furby who was new in school, made a best friend, and dealt with an annoying Fur-boy in class.

We did other creative things, too. We enjoyed building a house of Pattern Blocks and calling it the Grinch house (because the Grinch and his wife lived there. Duh!), using the exact same block patterns and structures every time. We used woodchips to "draw" on the pavement at recess, imagining they were colored crayons. 

Every recess, we'd sit under the fire truck-shaped jungle gym and brunch woodchips against the tire-based floor. We'd name them after events and characters on The Book of Pooh, a show that we once got up early to watch during a sleepover at her house, perhaps for inspiration. For example, in one episode Pooh is trying to open his brown front door but it won't budge because a large honeypot is in the way. Pooh looks at the camera and says, "I guess my door doesn't feel like opening today." Hence, the crayon called "I-guess-my-door-doesn't-feel-like-opening-today Brown" was born. Usually we'd announce the color we thought a woodchip would be before testing it out, letting it leave its slight white mark. And we'd rejoice if it turned out to be right. "Yes! It is Tigger Orange!"

Of course, we were almost always right.

But telling stories was one of our favorite things to do. We'd go over to each other's houses, get out the notepads, and write.

A chapter per page, these stories were fairly lengthy for first-grade writers. Every so often, we'd stop to read aloud what we had written. While Christine would usually start from her new portion, I would always start the story from the beginning. My mom was a captive, yet cooperative audience. 

We got to do this for homework, too. We had Homework Journals where we would have to answer questions once in a while that the teacher posed. They would write back and ask another question, and so on. When you finished one color journal, you'd move on to the next. I engaged in a silent battle with Christine over this all year. It seemed like she was always ahead of me, and I would work to write long entries in order to try and catch up.