Assignment #2: The Larger World

Assignment: How an insignificant event has changed you.

“Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance: not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you.”

My parents have a picture of me hidden in a photo album in their TV room in Duluth. I’m sitting on a train in France. I know it’s the TGV because of the sickening blue and aqua color scheme. I look terrified.

I’m 15. I’m wearing a pair of jeans and a white long-sleeved Marshall Track and Field T-shirt. I’m huddled against the window of the train, forcing a smile, and the seat next to me is empty.

I had never even driven myself to the mall before when my parents agreed to let me spend a summer in France with Julie, our former foreign exchange student. Our family visited hers that summer, and my parents agreed to let me spend the rest of the summer there so I could go to Julie’s sister’s wedding.

They left me at a train station in Paris after a two-week whirlwind tour of the country. I sat on top of my overstuffed suitcases with my cousin Lindsay while waiting for the train. We leaned against the railing of a second-floor bridge, and Lindsay was laughing at me.

“You look so scared!” she said. “You’re all white!”

Two days earlier, my parents had laughed at me as I tried to order a bottle of water at a restaurant in Bordeaux. My mom was coaching me on how to say it. I had two years of middle-school French under my belt and it was worthless.

Julie is wonderful. Over the 10 years I’ve known her, she’s been a constant source of support and laughter for me. When I hear French now, it calms me because it brings to mind so many happy and comforting times.

But she was still a lot older than me the first summer I spent there. She was 19. She had just finished high school. She and her friends smoked, drank and swore. I didn’t.

So I was terrified when my parents left. They just walked out of the train station, leaving their 15-year-old daughter all alone.

The ride to the west from Paris to Landerneau, where Julie grew up, takes about four hours. I remember that now because it’s a ride I’ve taken many times over the years. Landerneau is in Brittany, a region that makes up France’s northwest peninsula. It’s an area with strong Celtic heritage and it’s own language (Breton), although it’s mostly dead now.

And throughout most of the ride, I looked out the window and cried.

The trust that my parents showed in me (and Julie) that summer still blows me away. I had always been an independent kid, but my French was broken at best and I don’t think I was ready to spend so much time away from home.

But that train ride – and that summer – established a life for me where I feel OK leaving my world behind, if only for a summer. I always feel my wanderlust kick in once I’ve been somewhere for more than eight months, and more often than not I am drawn to France.

The country welcomed me as a teenager. Over the past 10 years, I've visited five times, for anywhere from one week to five months. It has taught me its language and its culture. It's opened its arms to me, and proved to me that I can survive by myself when I'm scared and alone. It welcomed me again as at 22, more scared than I had been the first time around because my sister had just died and my world was falling apart.

The spring after Betsy died, I studied abroad in Paris to get away from the U.S. for just a little longer. At the end of May, though, my parents flew to Paris because Julie was getting married and we were all going to Brittany for the wedding.

To get there, we went to the same train station that I had left from more than eight years earlier. Our seats on the train were facing each other, and after I helped my parents throw their bags into the metal luggage racks near the train doors, my Mom sat in the seat across from me.

Three hours into the trip, she looked at me.

“This is an amazing view, Emily. It’s so beautiful. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

I’m not sure if she was asking a rhetorical question. Or maybe she really didn’t remember it. But it was the same route I had taken the day my parents abandoned me in a foreign train station and left me to fend for myself.

Assignment #1: Write about school

Click here to read my post about the purpose of this blog.

I never thought about Congdon when I was a student at Congdon Park Elementary in Duluth, I only thought about Kevin.

Congdon is in a very austere, old building, and it was named after an even older Duluth businessman. It’s the rich kids’ public school in Duluth, in the east part of town. It’s north of the mansions on the shore of Lake Superior and south of “Pill Hill,” where all the doctors lived.

The red brick and imposing features of the building were lost on me, though. I met a boy in second grade who lent me his markers. Kevin had a whole grimy handful of them. He leaned over his desk to mine on one of the first days of school, and told me I could share them.

Congdon tried very hard to be an innovative school, so that year we had a split class of second- and third-grade students. Our desks were arranged in clumps of five, so I spent most of the year gazing across my desk and trying to decide whether Kevin’s brown hair reminded me more of Joey from New Kids on the Block or Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

Our teacher that year was Mrs. R. She had blonde, curly hair and wore the kind of teacher-pattern jumpsuit that I still make fun of my mom for wearing. She was nice, too. She went on to be the principal of another elementary school in Duluth, but when I was in high school she was arrested for shoplifting from a department store in town.

As if it were some sort of curse to punish me for my feelings of unrequited love, Kevin and I were in the same class for the entirety of elementary school. One day, I even heard him shout his phone number to a classmate leaving on a school bus. It was only one digit different from mine.

Surely, that was a sign.

My best friend at Congdon was a girl named Sara. She was adopted from Korea, which was totally fascinating to me because I had never met someone who wasn’t white. Her eyes looked weird to me, but I got over it ‘cause she was really nice. (Apparently I hadn’t yet realized that my Dad, my sister and I were biracial).

In third grade, Sara and I were talking one day while lifting up the top of our desks and storing our textbooks inside. Sara knew about my obsession with Kevin’s dimples and was usually kind to me about it, saying that there was always a chance.

Classes were almost over for the day, so I walked out the classroom door and started taking my winter gear from my light-brown metal locker. I lived only three blocks from Congdon, but Duluthwinters are brutal and the chances of getting thrown in a snowbank were high, so I had a big blue jacket and black snowpants to put on.

Bundled up, I walked into the classroom to wait for dismissal. Sara came to talk to me while I was standing only feet behind Kevin. Mrs. Peterson saw that I had already put my snow clothes on, and told me to take them off until class was officially over.

See, I thought I had put my snowpants on. I didn’t realize I had forgotten them in my locker. Seemingly following Mrs. Peterson’s orders, I pulled my pants down.

Sara gasped, and Kevin turned around and saw me standing there in my underwear. Confusion ensued, until Sara told me to pull my pants up.

Only those two classmates saw it, but I was hearbroken.

I’m not sure how close I came to planting that kiss on him during the last two years of elementary school. I remember passing notes on the playground, and swooning when he and the other hockey players saw how high they could get on the swings and then jumped off.

I remember him dating a girl named Ashley, though, as much as fourth-graders can date. She was popular blond girl who caused me a considerable amount of pain once we reached adolescence.

But I do remember that I saw Kevin cry. We were in fifth-grade together, in Mr. B’s class. It was our last year in elementary school, we were supposed to grow up and get ready to move on.

Mr. B was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of the school year. He had to wear a black leather Chicago Bulls baseball hat to cover his bald head. We had a long-term substitute teacher who was really mean to us even though Mr. B. was in the hospital. Two days after the end of school, Mr. B died.

His funeral was held at St. Paul’s Episcopalian Church on Superior Street. It’s this big, cold, stone building where everybody was serious all the time. They had all the kids from Mr. B’s class sit in the same row at the funeral. And when they played Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” I saw him cry. We all cried.

I left Congdon depressed at the end of fifth-grade, never having known anyone that died before. But I knew Kevin was going to Marshall, where I was going too for sixth-grade. So our future held infinite possibilities.

Writing About Your Life

I had my first ever employee review on Wednesday.

It was really good, actually. Lots of complimentary things, including a prediction that I will "go very far in the field of journalism."

But this stuck out: "You're a much better reporter than writer," my editor said to me, peering over his coffee cup while preparing to take a sip. "You've got very few holes in your stories, and you always have fabulous details to include. You can really get people to talk to you. But your writing ... Sometimes I feel like it doesn't really flow together. I think you need to work on having each paragraph support the weight of the one above it and lead into the one below it."

Now, I'm not 100 percent sure what that means. But I am a driven, type-A, prep-school educated oldest child, and that means that I need to do something it.

This blog is what I am doing.

I'm undertaking a challenge to myself to improve my writing. I am going to spend a year writing about my life. Eight-hundred words a day.

The inspiration for this daunting and perhaps misguided project is a book called "Writing About Your Life" by William Zinsser. Those who have taken a journalism class or two will know him as the author of "On Writing Well," one of the premier books on writing well (heh).

It was sitting on my bookshelf looking at me this afternoon as I contemplated how to improve my writing. I thought, "Well, I'll just go through that chapter by chapter, and write about what he tells me to."

That's what I'll do. There are only 13 chapters, though, so after that I'll have to find some new inspiration for topics about my life. Any suggestions are welcome. I hope the blog will be more in the style of David Sedaris than James Frey (and by that I mean not made up).

I'm not promising an entry every single day, but ALMOST every day. Harass me if I am not getting the job done.

I have a very wise friend who believes that blogs are dumb and droning if they do not have a point to them, as well as a set end date. I agree. So I will keep this blog until Dec. 1, 2007, and then it will disappear into the Internet abyss.

(End note: Is it ironic that the blog's spell checker doesn't recognize the word blog?)