Modest Goddess

I was listening to a guy on the radio today who grew up in Detroit as one of the only white kids in his neighborhood. He slept with a baseball bat by his head as a security blanket. As a wannabe writer, I sometimes worry that I didn't have a tragic enough childhood and suffer from a fatal lack of material. I mean, couldn't my parents, just once, have piled all my things on the front lawn and set them on fire, like the crazed alcoholic mother in The Liar's Club? And that was just the tip of the iceberg for Mary Karr, and look at what a great book she wrote! But no. I just have the conventional story of my parents' divorce. I didn't even have the sense to act out over it at the time, so I don't have any stories about running away or having sex with the wrong guy.

So it comes to remembering small moments and in the care of relating them. I remember in fifth grade, my friends and I became convinced there was a secret faculty swimming pool somewhere in our elementary school. We decided it was under a heavy metal hatch in a hallway, and one day we stayed after school and pried it open. While two of us strained to hold it up, we peered in, and saw a very grimy ladder leading down into blackness. Even my 10-year-old self, which really, really wanted to believe we'd found the way to the Lost Swimming Pool, had to conclude that there most likely wasn't anything down there. We were actually stunned that there was anything at all under that hatch. But none of us had the nerve to climb down there.

Now that would have been a story.