Assignment: Write about a time in your early life when you felt powerful.
In seventh grade (1978) at Pacific Union College Elementary School, my teacher tried to integrate me. She gave me a big part in an audition for the school Christmas play (was it Joseph or one of the wise men, it was definitely not Jesus nor God the Father), and while flattered and moved and knowing that this was natural for me, I deliberately sabotaged my performance, showing no emotion, and ended up with a non-speaking shepherd’s role.
Her next attempt to rev me up was more successful. She asked me to write a story using everybody in the class (about 30) as a character. This was fun! I decided to shipwreck us on a desert island. I particularly loved writing the role of one attractive classmate, Denise Bernard, and was sure I had done it subtly and until the girls said I had given my feelings away.
The class loved my story. I felt the center of attention and realized I could be powerful by playing to how much people loved to read about themselves.
In eighth grade, entranced by American media (from newspapers to magazines to books to radio and television), much more exciting than fusty old Seventh-Day Adventist religion, I decided to dedicate myself to journalism. Over the next few years, I learned that if your audience was big enough or your story was important enough, you could interview anyone. And I did for KAHI/KHYL radio, talking to people like Jim Lampley, Tom Landry, Randy White, Bill Walsh, Steve Young, Joe Montana, Roger Craig, Senator Allen Cranston, Supervisor Mike Antonovich, Larry Bird, etc.
A critic of mine told Rolling Stone in 1999 that the industry loved to read about themselves in my column, my blog, my development of a lesson I learned in seventh grade.
I had intimations of this power in second grade, when I entered school at Avondale College Primary School. One day, perhaps it was third grade, we walked a mile into the bush and sat on a narrow bridge over a muddy creek that I crossed twice a day going to and from school, and we looked into the water at the ancient mossy logs and we wrote about what we saw.
I jotted down phrases about ghosts buried in the stream. I was embarrassed I couldn’t get the thing to cohere. When I read it, I was sure people would protest that it didn’t make sense, but that didn’t happen. The teachers anyway, they loved it. They were moved, touched, excited. They said it was poetry.
I basked in their praise, more warming than the sun, and felt confirmed that I was very good at something. Some kids were good at cricket and other kids got As. Some kids were popular and other kids were rich. I was something too. I was a writer.
I had power. I could move people. I could infuriate them or make them cry. And just as important, I had not just a skill, but a mission. Whatever I would do in life, I knew it would be preparation for writing. No matter how sad I got, how humiliated, I knew it would just be fodder. And those cute girls in school who ignored me, one day they’d be sorry. I’d become more famous than any of them.
