Beginnings

[tedwords]

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” — Plato

 

No shit, Plato. Without the beginning, we can't go anywhere, can we?

 

It reminds me of a production of The Miracle Worker I was in years ago. I had the first line in the play, as the curtain rises and the doctor is discovering examining baby Helen Keller after a serious health incident and reporting back to Ma and Pa Keller. I think it was the only line I had, but oh, so important: "She'll live."

 

Had the curtain gone up and I had said, "She's dead," the play really couldn't go on, could it?

 

Anyway, this is my beginning. The beginning of my journals, that is, which might as well be the beginning of my story. I began keeping a journal at the age of 13, on August 16, 1979, writing with a thin magic marker in a blue composition book issued by New England School Supply (A Milton Bradley Company, 40 pages). I wrote on the front cover in big blue letters "The Mitchell Saga, volume 1: The True Story," and referred to everyone (even myself) in the third person. I think I had some thoughts of being a writer, even then.
 

 

I have no idea why I started writing. I didn't receive a diary or anything with a lock and key. I just saw this blue composition book, probably swiped from my father, an elementary school principal, and felt the urge to start writing. Kind of like Doc Whatsisname, someone handed me a blue journal and said, "he'll live." And I started writing.

 

Here are the deathless words of prose that open up my journal:

 

"A day of changes. Laurie is going to Nana Hall's because Mom and Dad don't want her around. Dad is planning to go to Block Island today, and Ted begins band."

 

Ah. New beginnings. There it is right there. My sister was being sent off to Cape Cod to stay with our grandmother for a few weeks (what torture that must have been)...but, kind of sad that I had to qualify the sentence with "my parents don't want her around." I wonder if I felt bad for her, by writing that. That certainly doesn't sound like me. Laurie and I really did not get along at that time. Maybe I was editorializing. Take that, impartial reporter.

 

And the next sentence: dad was taking off for Block Island. Mom always hated those trips: dad with the boys, carousing, leaving mom to schlep three kids around during the summer (excluding Laurie, who she apparently didn't want). And then, the big thing: I was starting band.

 

Aha! Well, there's the cause for me starting a journal, I am sure.

 

I kind of remember that summer, even all these years later, and the anxiousness I felt about starting something like band. My junior high years were probably the most miserable of my life, short of the Trump presidency--I was a pimply, pasty-faced kid who was perpetually picked on and kind of kept to myself and didn't have friends to speak of at all (Laurie, a year younger, was the popular one).

 

I think I saw going to high school as a fresh beginning, a way to erase those past two years, a way to be someone else. I think I saw band as a chance to actually make some friends. Because girlfriend, I tell you, that journal I started writing in was most likely the only thing I had to confide in at that point in time.

 

And my nervousness about starting a new adventure like that, much as I wanted it, was the reason I started writing things down, even I did choose to write in the third person. Those last three lines, I assure you, was the entire reason I started writing anything at all in 'The Mitchell Saga.' (and by the way, how pompous is that title? This is NOT the Odyssey; of that I can assure you!)

 

Still. I was taking a chance, and taking chances was not something I liked doing at all. I was entirely happy to live my life in a tiny little bubble. Well, maybe not happy. But resigned. And secretly looking, I think, for a pin to make that bubble go pop.

 

A day of changes, indeed. "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," Emily Dickson once wrote. Starting a journal was my way of getting at my truth, whatever that was. And I guess, it only took me 40 or so years to get there.