Building a Bridge

“Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them.”

~ Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

“Would you say I’m a writer, businessman or a businessman, writer” I asked Cindy as we merged into traffic.

We were on our way home from Writer’s Workshop, the writing class we teach to a room full of fourth graders each Thursday. Cindy pondered, giving the question her undivided from one light to the next.  ”Businessman, writer,” she said as I was sailing through the green.

I agreed, but it got me thinking.

I had a brief run of wanting to be a writer back when I was about 5, all the way up until age 8 or so. I use to tap out little stories on an old manual from Sears. I think most of my early work was about robots, space, and probably He-Man, though I do remember one story in particular that featured Spiderman fighting a giant snowman (I lived in Southern California and never left, lending snow a rather mystical quality to my eyes).

Unfortunately, none of these early stories has survived.

At age 8, I stopped attending the private school I’d been going to since I was two; the school where they put books in my hands so early that I have no memory of ever learning to read them.  Eventually, tuition moved from difficult to inconceivable and my sister and I migrated to the best public school our parents could manage.

Our neighborhood school was an abomination.

My oldest sister was in attendance until the day one of the teachers told my father in a conference that some kids are destined for mediocrity, and that they’d both be a lot happier if they accepted this essential truth early on.

The school was a good mile and a half from our house. Still, had the rest of us been home, we could have probably heard our father’s anger echoing across the campus hallways.

That was all he needed to pull my sister, now the senior nurse in her city’s largest hospital, from campus and enroll her in a small private school just beyond our means. My sister and I immediately followed.

The private school had no grades; the students instead encouraged to reach toward their ability. One of the biggest shocks of my life was moving from a school where my brain was given breath, to one where I was bored out of my skull, day upon day, in a never ending purgatory of doldrums and deja vu.

Bored silly and drifting through days without challenge, I acquired the art of commerce.

Baseball cards, comic books, Garbage Pail Kids, repurposed G.I.Joes (don’t ask), etc. etc. I had my own black satchel, stuffed with the stock of my mobile mercantile. I carried the bag everywhere I went and considered it at least thrice as important as my schoolbag.

I opened my first bank account when I was twelve. The bank’s official policy was thirteen, but our family flower shop was spitting distance from the bank, and since our store had an account, the manager agreed to make an exception.

The remainder of my meandering years in school hold countless stories for different days. I squirmed my way through every second, finished left early, and bought my first business at 18. Fast forward a decade and a half until one day I suddenly found myself unearthing a calling that had been buried beneath the detritus of past decades dissipated.

I’ve been thinking like a businessman a lot longer than I’ve been thinking like a writer. Now I know what must be done and I’m building a bridge to balance my abilities.

Writer Dad

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