So Many Mistakes

Mistakes come in all shapes and sizes. I’m on a first name basis with most of them.

Early on, I got acquainted with some I couldn’t shake. Perfectionism and Persistence caused considerable trouble, a continuing, lifelong theme.

When I was four years old, I wrote my first book. But I wrote it in purple crayon on the living room wall. I was blind-sided by my parents’ reaction. I’d never upset them before by doing something wrong.

My father stored the crayons on the top shelf of the hall closet. For days, I often opened that door, staring up at them, worrying about other stories I needed to write. But how? Eventually my father returned them to me, along with large sheets of paper. He explained the wall was his territory.

Paper was mine.

In first grade, I only cared about books. But they were about the world’s dullest children: Dick, Jane, and Sally. These kids were lucky enough to have a dog but simply repeated how it could Go, go, go. Run, run, run. I peeked ahead, hoping to find an actual story. The teacher cleared her throat loudly.

I looked up. She stared at me. I’d never done the wrong thing in school before.

Looking back, I suspect she called my home because that week my mother took me to the public library. I discovered Curious George, who lived more than one verb at a time. I took the book home and read it every day for a week until we returned it for another.

I was excluded from classroom reading groups for years, sent to the school library, free to read beyond my grade level.

Public library access led to magazines and newspapers where I learned about J.D. Salinger’s controversial novel, The Catcher in the Rye. How could a book be so wrong? I was a seventh grader, saving my allowance, biding my time until my mother and I went to a department store with a book section.

I left her in shoes with some excuse and took the elevator to the books. Stacks of Salinger’s novel waited for me. While I stood in line, a deep voice behind me asked, “Do your parents know you have that book?”

Caught doing the wrong thing again.

I turned to see the smiling face of our town’s library director. He apologized for scaring me and said it was a significant book and that I should definitely read it.

As a college English major, I continued down the wrong track, reading the novels that weren’t assigned, writing papers that weren’t bound to the accepted literary sources. Some professors praised me; some dismissed me.

Caught out of bounds.

Still, the worst mistake of all, was becoming a high school English teacher, the thing I promised myself I would never do. I wanted to be a writer, but I needed a job. On the first day of school, I entered the building, feeling like a failure, following the required syllabus, giving the mandated assignments.

Gradually, I realized no one official was looking. I could allow students to write outside the prescriptive pattern. I showed them powerful one-sentence paragraphs and how a single sentence could wind images down that page. I had them create their own. We read them out loud and discussed why they worked.

Or didn’t. Together, we revised them.

Instead of writing the tired, old essay topics for a novel, they wrote what might have happened next if the story had continued. Or how a character might have turned out in another twenty years.

In time, I was caught.

Administrators told me I was teaching at a graduate school level that my students couldn’t attain. I was too demanding. I was veering off course. A colleague complained there was nothing left for her to teach, an empty excuse, if ever I heard one.

They wanted me to stop putting too much emphasis on writing.

I resigned that summer.

But mistakes circle back with a story to tell.

By chance, I’ve glimpsed the rippling effects of my mistakes that began with a purple crayon and a blank wall. Two former students are writing novels, one is writing a theater arts book, another is deciding if his idea is a short story or one-act play, and one has a novel launching next year.

All my errors behind me? Certainly not. I’ve wandered into new areas.

Each fall, I place pumpkins and two yellow chrysanthemums on our front porch. Somehow this year at the greenhouse, I wandered out of the designated yellow area. Typical. Once they began blooming, I was disappointed by my mistake and considered taking one back.

I was in the yard this week when a local couple stopped and remarked, “You changed it up this year,” she said. Her husband said, “What a great red!”

They mentioned nothing about the two perfect pumpkins.