I have had the urge to write as long as I can remember. It’s not that I think I’m a particularly good or gifted writer, but the fact is that I have to write. I need to write. Some people need to drink or smoke or eat; I need to write. I don’t know why that is, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. I’m pretty sure it’s Butterfly’s fault. Everything is Butterfly’s fault.
Some of my earliest memories are of her writing. She had a running correspondence with her mom and her siblings. Each week, like clockwork, letters would flow back and forth across the country. In those days there was no email, and long-distance phone calls were expensive. They were only made in dire times – to announce a death, or birth, perhaps. Indeed, the latter might just as easily have been saved for a mailed birth announcement, thank you very much. A stamp was a lot cheaper than a phone call!
By the time I arrived on the scene, she and my father had decided that winters in Pennsylvania were far too cold. They had loaded their first-born, then 6-month-old, Martha into their pick-up truck, along with the dog and refrigerator, and had headed west, bound for Los Angeles. They were true pioneers, having neither job nor house at the other end. They were just looking for a better, warmer life.
Not only would she write these weekly missives, but she’d also read them aloud to those of us too young to read, or let us read them to ourselves once we mastered the art. I think these facts alone clearly prove my fascination with writing is her fault. But there’s more.
It seemed to my juvenile little mind that if she was going to write, I should, too. So I wrote to my grandmother and my aunts and my uncles. Some wrote back, tucking a note in with their letter to my mother. One uncle in particular took a special interest in writing to me. I still have his letters and in one he mentions that he remembers writing letters when he was young and never getting any answers. I would look forward to his letters because he was a pilot for Pan American Airlines and would write to me on hotel stationary from around the world. And even though he was writing to an 8 or 9 or 10-year-old child, he would write as though he was talking to an adult. I loved his letters.
It’s also Butterfly’s fault I learned to read, which goes hand in hand with writing. When I was all of 4 or 5 years old, I would follow her along as she did her daily chores, reading to her. Ok, trying to read to her. Or I’d sit on the toilet (with the lid down, of course) while she soaked in the bathtub at night, reading to her. I remember her laughing as I struggled to sound out words (those were the good old days of phonetics). I was reading a book about Yosemite Sam and I had not seen the word before. It went something like this:
Me: “’Get your gun!’ said Yo-za-mighty Sam.”
Butterfly: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha snarfle sputter choke ha ha ha ha. That’s Yosemite! Ha ha ha. Keep going.”
Me: “’Can’t I finish my ba-coon and eggs first?”
Butterfly: More hysterical laughter and near drowning (have I mentioned she doesn’t know how to swim? “That’s bacon, keep going.” More snickers.
She was a brave woman to listen to my struggles with reading while she was in a body of water. You know, don’t you, that you can drown in mere inches of water?
Another thing that Butterfly did to force me to write instill the love of writing in me was throw this phrase out anytime any of us complained about anything: “Write a letter!”
“Mom, my candy bar is stale!” This was a particularly important complaint, since we were allowed only half a candy bar per day.
“Write a letter!”
“Mom, there are only 11 and a half ounces of soda in my can!” This, too, was critical because we were allowed only half a soda a day. Our family was on a very tight budget.
“Write a letter!”
“Mom, this puzzle is missing pieces!”
“Write a letter!”
Oh – you know about that one, don’t you? That is, you know about it if you’ve been reading along and paying attention. I did write a letter (she was insistent) and they’re sending a new puzzle - just like when I wrote all those letters as a kid and got lots of candy, lots of soda and lots of “special” things. But it wasn’t about the “things” I got that made those letter-writing exercises so valuable; it was what I learned about how to communicate with the outside world and how to achieve what I needed or wanted to achieve long before I ever got to school. That is what made my mother a brilliant teacher.
A few months ago (July 21st to be exact) The New Yorker magazine hit the stands and caused a huge furor. Like everyone else, I was fascinated with it, but for an entirely different reason than the political brouhaha occasioned by its cover.
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The New Yorker that caught my interest
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It has a story in it titled “The Lion and the Mouse”, which is about the struggles that E. B. White went through getting his book Stuart Little published, beginning in 1939. I found that issue of the magazine fascinating because I have a bit of history with Stuart, Mr. White, and even Mrs. White. And it all involves the one other person to blame for my writing addiction: my 6th grade teacher, the person who introduced me to Stuart. I think she was in cahoots with Butterfly.
Little did I know when I stumbled in to my 6th-grade class in the fall of 1965 that I was about to begin a life-long, life-changing friendship. It’s hard to recognize those things when you’re only 11 years old.
Maureen, my 6th-grade-teacher, read Stuart Little to our class. Then she gave what sounds like a simple enough assignment: Write a new ending. I learned in the “New Yorker” article that a fifth-grade class in 1946 undertook this same assignment. They quoted one little girl’s ending, which took all of nine short paragraphs. She and I are of very, very different mind sets.
My first submission to the teacher went on for pages. I was on a roll. I had all sorts of ideas about how Stuart was going to find the lovebird of his life, Margalo. I couldn’t write fast enough.
“Mrs. H, Mrs. H, may I write some more to my story, please?” I pleaded when I turned in my new ending.
“I suppose so,” she said with a smile. She probably didn’t have a lot of students asking to extend their assignments.
Thus started a weekly ritual that went on for the rest of the school year. The other kids in class would ask to hear Tammy’s latest “Stuart Story” because this one innocent little assignment had opened up a floodgate in my head.
I would pound away at the typewriter at home whenever I had a spare moment (yes, I had taught myself to type using some records – you know, those old plastic disc things - my mom found). Then one day I got the crazy idea to try to get my stories published.
“Mrs. H., don’t you think I have enough stories to try to make a book?”
“Well, certainly, but there’s a little problem in that you’ve used many of Mr. White’s characters, and that’s not legal,” she kindly explained.
“What do I do?” I asked.
“You could try writing him a letter and asking his permission to use them,” she suggested. What the heck? Had she been talking to Butterfly? Was “Write a letter!” the only thing these people knew how to say?
But write a letter I did. I checked first to make sure he was alive, because I had learned the hard way what happens when you write to dead people (that’s another story).
Then the wait began. I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more.
Finally a letter arrived, but it was not from Mr. E. B. White. Oh, no. It was from Mrs. Katharine White, his wife. I tried desperately to find it so I could scan it in for you to read, but I’ve put it someplace very safe. Probably it’s with some Christmas gifts, just waiting to be discovered. Essentially it said this: NO, YOU MAY NOT USE MY HUSBAND’S CHARACTERS. THINK UP YOUR OWN. KEEP WRITING. Of course, she said it in a kind and gentle way, but that was the essence of her message. I think if she could have added “and stop bothering my husband, you annoying little child” she would have.
I was sorely disappointed. Here I had written the great American novel and I couldn’t publish it! But, as you can see, that has not stopped me from blathering on.
And me and Mrs. H? Well, she’s no longer Mrs. H – she’s just Maureen. And we’ve remained fast friends to this day, through thick and thin. I can remember calling her when it was time for Fifinella to go to school. I called for her advice about whether to put her in public or private school.
“Why on earth would you call me for advice when you have the best advisor at your fingertips?” she asked me.
“Who would that be?”
“Your mom! I remember her coming in to your first student/teacher conference and telling me to stop sending so much homework home with you. She told me I had you 6 hours during the day and that was plenty for school work. She said you had so much work to do when you got home (with your chores) that if you had so much homework, you’d never have any time to just play and be a kid. Best advice I ever got!”
Wiser words were never spoken.
