I’ve been going through old papers. My mom saved everything, especially the art stuff: Half finished pictures, 3 words on an otherwise blank page, an excessively pasty attempt at a pop-up book…
I found a gem.
Apparently, when I was in second grade I wrote my first poem.
It went like this:
—
I am a brown squirrel.
I saw a girl.
I gave her a pearl.
She put it in her curl.
—
I even made a little drawing to go with it: a curly-haired girl with big puffy lips and…wait for it… a pearl in one of her curly Q’s. It didn’t make much sense. You can’t put a pearl in a curl.
But, now that I’m older and have gone around the world a few times, I think it’s pretty cool.
You can’t change who you were and what you did as a kid. So, when you rediscover an old memory, it can be a little risky. Maybe you’re not the kid you thought you were, or wish you were. It can mess everything up.
But this poem was a bullseye. I like everything about it.
Way to go, kid.