writing
Ok, some more writing for you. Mrs. Sanchez, if you are out there, I hope you're reading this.
Shadows
In third grade, four-square WAS the rage at recess. On the days that Janie was thus occupied, I would find some excuse not to go outside, or, when there was no getting around it, I would sit on the edge of the playground and amuse myself with leaves and sticks. Shorter sticks became children; taller ones their parents. Drifting autumn leaves became pajamas and party dresses. Things continued in this vain for weeks, until finally I decided that reading about the exploits of Ramona Quimby were far more preferable than the grudging silence of my stick-people. I did not view this decision as a means of perpetuating my isolation. Rather, I was proud of my maturity and ingenuity. If there was no hope for peer interaction on a given day, why should I allow myself to suffer? Unfortunately, Mrs. Sanchez, who happened to be the first person to tell me that I would be a great writer one day, did not agree with my logic.
“Why are you reading, Tasha,” she had asked at the beginning of November.
“Because Janie is playing four-square,” I answered simply.
“Well, put it away,” she reprimanded. “Recess is no time for reading.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. Even if I had spoken more loudly, I doubt that she would have heard my apology. Already, I could detect the sound of her loafers receding into the distance, the same way they had done the week earlier, when she had found one of my printed papers on the floor.
“Do you know what this is?” she had asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Tasha, you know what happens to things that get left on the floor.” I will always remember the striking contrast between the violated smoothness of those torn bits of paper and the palm they had lain upon. Mrs. Sanchez’s hands were large and wrinkled, like misshapen marshmallows. She had fled from me that time too, as if propelled by an invisible force, escaping to the sanctuary of the teacher’s desk before I had a chance to ask her why I was treated so differently from the other children, and, as an afterthought, what it was she had destroyed. It has taken me twelve years to discover that the mysterious force was not anger or dislike. Nno,t was nothing more and nothing less than her own discomfort.
My friends are often puzzled when I tell them I relish the satisfaction of editing the writing of others just as much as producing my own work. There is an almost sensual pleasure in becoming intimate with a particularly deformed and circuitous sentence, in stripping away its unnecessary flab, in divesting it of its “The fact that’s” and its “the reason why’s.” I especially enjoy the hopeless cases, in which commas and colons cause disparate ideas to stick together like last year’s Halloween candy. Always, there is the preposition in search of its referent, the dangling modifier hungry for resolution. When these things have been set to rights, and the grammar gods are smiling down upon me, the author’s meaning, her tone, her intention, gradually begin to emerge. All too often, language can be a foil, a means of escaping what one is trying to say as much as it is a means of saying it. The passive voice implies the avoidance of responsibility. A preposition without a referent implies uncertainty. An omission of a comma implies a refusal to pay silence its due. As the editor, it is not my place to tell this hidden story, only to make the author aware of its presence so that she can recount it in her own time.
Shadows
In third grade, four-square WAS the rage at recess. On the days that Janie was thus occupied, I would find some excuse not to go outside, or, when there was no getting around it, I would sit on the edge of the playground and amuse myself with leaves and sticks. Shorter sticks became children; taller ones their parents. Drifting autumn leaves became pajamas and party dresses. Things continued in this vain for weeks, until finally I decided that reading about the exploits of Ramona Quimby were far more preferable than the grudging silence of my stick-people. I did not view this decision as a means of perpetuating my isolation. Rather, I was proud of my maturity and ingenuity. If there was no hope for peer interaction on a given day, why should I allow myself to suffer? Unfortunately, Mrs. Sanchez, who happened to be the first person to tell me that I would be a great writer one day, did not agree with my logic.
“Why are you reading, Tasha,” she had asked at the beginning of November.
“Because Janie is playing four-square,” I answered simply.
“Well, put it away,” she reprimanded. “Recess is no time for reading.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. Even if I had spoken more loudly, I doubt that she would have heard my apology. Already, I could detect the sound of her loafers receding into the distance, the same way they had done the week earlier, when she had found one of my printed papers on the floor.
“Do you know what this is?” she had asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Tasha, you know what happens to things that get left on the floor.” I will always remember the striking contrast between the violated smoothness of those torn bits of paper and the palm they had lain upon. Mrs. Sanchez’s hands were large and wrinkled, like misshapen marshmallows. She had fled from me that time too, as if propelled by an invisible force, escaping to the sanctuary of the teacher’s desk before I had a chance to ask her why I was treated so differently from the other children, and, as an afterthought, what it was she had destroyed. It has taken me twelve years to discover that the mysterious force was not anger or dislike. Nno,t was nothing more and nothing less than her own discomfort.
My friends are often puzzled when I tell them I relish the satisfaction of editing the writing of others just as much as producing my own work. There is an almost sensual pleasure in becoming intimate with a particularly deformed and circuitous sentence, in stripping away its unnecessary flab, in divesting it of its “The fact that’s” and its “the reason why’s.” I especially enjoy the hopeless cases, in which commas and colons cause disparate ideas to stick together like last year’s Halloween candy. Always, there is the preposition in search of its referent, the dangling modifier hungry for resolution. When these things have been set to rights, and the grammar gods are smiling down upon me, the author’s meaning, her tone, her intention, gradually begin to emerge. All too often, language can be a foil, a means of escaping what one is trying to say as much as it is a means of saying it. The passive voice implies the avoidance of responsibility. A preposition without a referent implies uncertainty. An omission of a comma implies a refusal to pay silence its due. As the editor, it is not my place to tell this hidden story, only to make the author aware of its presence so that she can recount it in her own time.