The Teenager
by Steven Craig
Painting with words is difficult for most.
I know, it still makes me grim to remember my high school English teacher saying that my writing was horrid, and my use of the English language was destructive. He said this from a rather large, Slavic head, a face strained by too many years confined in the cage of a classroom with certified wild animals. His bulbous lips sprayed when he spoke those words to me, effluvia best studies in a different department. He moved about the place uttering incantations about how many more years he had to retirement.
His classrooms were barren sand dunes of mindless teens, all bent on personal self destruction in their age of immortality. None were ever serious about learning anything English, our 40 word vocabulary of 4 letter words were more than sufficient to get though life, and our grades were proof positive of our abilities to succeed among those of the human race. We built paper airplanes of the exams, used our book for blotters on rainy days, and answered in different order for roll call every day.
I rather enjoyed siting alone in the hall.
It was one day in the late spring which was more memorable, for it was the day he pronounced what each of our futures held.
Prison.
Insane asylums.
Chain gangs in Arkansas.
Target practice for the police.
And for me, a special aura of pronouncement.
That I would amount to nothing, absolutely nothing, with great certainly never anyone that could write or spell or frame a sentence in communication with anyone else who was remotely cognizant, let alone a paragraph or a page. I didn’t do a suitable page of words in all of that year.
Sigh.
“F” was my final as I crawled out of that class at the end of the year. Poisoned forever by the vista that as a teen, in that class, I was such a remarkable success.
Odd, isn’t it, that I became a writer.
05/07/2013
