Life Goal

It was the first day of my seventh grade year and I was sitting in a brand-new classroom in Garfield Junior High School, an easy bike ride from our half-acre Three Willow Ranch on Tenth and Candelaria--still in Albuquerque.

My new classroom had such interesting green blackboards--the last word in school design in those days.  

The class was English. Our second short in-class writing assignment--right after the obligatory "What I Did During Summer Vacation" was "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up".

I was a pretty sincere kid who usually told the truth to grown-ups--so I thought about it a few minutes and then wrote my piece on "I Want to Be a Writer When I Grow Up."

I really hadn't given it much thought before-- maybe a cowboy, a pilot or a fireman? But there I was in an English class and I loved to read and why not be Robert Louis Stevenson or Jack London or Edgar Allen Poe or Jules Verne or even Longfellow though I didn't much like that funny name.

When the teacher returned our graded papers the next day, mine had an "A" penciled in red. The teacher obviously was delighted to have a young Mark Twain in her classroom--and I never looked back.

So if you don't like the words you are reading on your monitor right now, you can blame a nameless English teacher at Garfield Junior High half a century ago who should have straightened me out and changed the course of my life with an "F".

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