Bricks

My first real exposure to writing came in sixth grade. Sure, I’d learned to draw letters, spell words and construct sentences long before, but it wasn’t until a group of us started a student newsletter that I realized the potential of writing to inform and entertain strangers.

Our elementary school divided classes into reading groups according to different levels of competency. There were eighteen kids in my class and three reading groups. I was in the advanced group, and by the end of fifth grade we had already completed the entire curriculum. To give us something to do, our sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Bleam, assigned our group to compose our own newsletter.

I wasn’t the smartest kid in my class- Jim Condon was. And he wanted to be a journalist when he grew up. I had no idea what a journalist was but figured it must be something important. He was named the editor of our newsletter, which I also assumed must be something important.

We were allowed to construct our newsletter in an empty office area that had belonged to the creepy elementary school principal until his position was dissolved, apparently because he did nothing except extol Dr. J and distribute jelly beans, calling them “happy pills.”

I volunteered to do the movie review and comic sections of the newsletter- in other words, the best parts. I cleverly titled the movie review section “Fiskell & Sezbert” and gave my opinions about the informational films we watched in class. (In those days, we got to watch actual films projected onto a screen that pulled down over the chalkboard. Jim ran the film projector.)

Jim reviewed our work before press-time. For the first issue, I had drawn a cartoon, but it was suggested that it wasn’t very good. At that time, I was obsessed with Marvel comics, and they inspired me to want to be able to draw. Our art teacher felt that it was more important for me to understand that I had no artistic ability whatsoever. Both Jim and JJ could draw, and every once in awhile JJ would give me a drawing of a Marvel hero, which I jealously cherished at the time and still own to this day. I nagged JJ for help with my cartoon, and he explained to me some basic principles of perspective. I wondered where he had acquired this information. I dropped the cartoon and instead contributed zingy one-liners cribbed from a joke book.

Much to my confusion, it was not the jokes others found funny but my movie reviews. In explanation, I learned of the word “candid” with an attempt to contextualize by using the television show Candid Camera, which I had never seen. Apparently, if you simply express your observations without being self-conscious, others will perceive that as humorous.

We printed and proudly distributed two or three issues of our newsletter before the other teachers complained that our entire class should be involved, but it seemed implicitly obvious there was no way to coordinate the logistics of doing so. We soon realized their objection was that we were working on it unsupervised, which was precisely the best part about it. I had relished the ability to explore and experiment with this project, rather than the usual regurgitation of information, which I found tedious. Why ask us for the answers when they already had a book containing all of them? I didn’t understand why we needed to be constantly lorded over, and suspected the sole function of adults was to prevent us from discovering anything they didn’t already know.

The newsletter was scrapped. I don’t remember what our reading group did instead. I spent the school days surreptitiously reading Marvel comics hidden under my desk and the evenings reading an entire compilation containing every Sherlock Holmes mystery except (I would discover years later) those containing references to cocaine. Later that year, I won an Easter art contest by drawing a rabbit with a red cape flying across the sky with bipedal rabbits below looking up, pointing and saying, “It’s a bird!” and, “It’s a plane!” On the far right, a little bunny trailing his mother while holding her hand said, “Look mom, it’s Superbunny!” Looking instead at the edge of the paper, the mother drolly replied, “Yes dear, hop along now.” The art teacher, who had not been a judge, made sure to remark that my picture had obviously won more for the humor than the artwork.

I have never won another contest of any sort in my life. I wouldn’t learn a useful thing from a teacher until college.