Running in the Family

When I was in 4th grade, I decided to write a teleplay. I'm not sure what possessed me.

Oh, who am I kidding: I know exactly why I did it. This was in the mid-1970s, the apex of the fascinating (infernal? as in Towering Inferno?) disaster-movie period in our pop culture, when you couldn't walk into a theater without being subjected to an earthquake, skyscraper fire, or crisis in a tin bird at 35,000 feet. I wanted to write one of those. Except, apparently, I believed that I couldn't start at the top with a screenplay. It made more sense to me to start with a TV movie.

Also, one of my best friends, David Hitchings (a 4th-grader), was many hundreds of pages into his first novel (the main characters were Gumby and Pokey -- it was my earliest contact with what we now call "fan fiction"), and I wanted a piece of that action too.

So I wrote the teleplay for Flashflood! (For those of you who experienced the Universal Studios tour in the 1970s, you know exactly what inspired me.) I lived in the mountain community of Idyllwild at the time, and up in the highest reaches of Fern Valley, on the edge of the San Jacinto National Forest, several large water tanks collected the water the town used. My disaster scenario hinged on all these tanks rupturing at once, and the escaping water rushed downhill, practically wiping out our little village.

Fortunately, my main character -- a 4th-grade boy who looked and sounded suspiciously like me -- was a fast thinker: he was able to collect his dog, throw it in the back of the family car, and drive down off the mountain to safety. I have no clue what became of that boy's family, but you can bet his dog was going to make it out alive. I remember carefully considering the issues of a 9-year-old behind the wheel: he had studied how his father and mother drove and imitated them. I delayed the flashflood just long enough to give the kid enough time to push the driver's seat up as far as it would go and adjust the mirrors accordingly. And I made sure the boy was a really bad driver at first, careening all over the road, braking and accelerating too quickly, until finally he got the hang of it and got himself down the long, winding road to nearby Banning.

I have no idea whatever happened to my teleplay. (My assumption is that it's lost amongst the papers that make up Irwin Allen's estate.) But I remember several days of dedication to this endeavor -- and I remember my 4th-grade teacher, Doris Lombard, giving me the room to "go with it" and do this to the best of my ability. Great teacher, that Mrs. Lombard. She also introduced me to Shakespeare, reading Macbeth to our class. A great lover of reading and writing. Everyone should be so lucky as to have a teacher like her.

***

Laura and I had our fall parent-teacher conference with Piper's second-grade teacher, Mrs. Fiamingo, this past week. Other than her penchant for tardiness at the beginning of the school day (this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows our family), her school year is going along swimmingly. Especially, apparently, when it comes to Piper's writing.

This doesn't surprise me too much; she has been showing a strong interest in writing from early on. When I took on NaNoWriMo two years ago, Piper picked up on that vibe and asked me if she could start writing her own story. So when I wasn't using the computer to knock out my daily word allotment, she was at plugging away on Meet Frederick the Squirrel. The process went like this: she would dictate to me a few sentences of the story and I would print them with pen on paper. Then I'd give her the paper and a blank Microsoft Word screen ... and away she'd go, transferring my writing with her hunt-and-pecking. She probably got a good 250 words into it before she changed the main character's name from Frederick to Piper, which held her interest a little better. And then finally she abandoned the story. But it was fun to watch her working on it.

Piper's class is unlike any second-grade class I've ever heard of. There is a remarkable focus on effective storytelling. They talk about theatricality when reading out loud. They talk about story structure. They have publication parties on the days that the students complete writing projects (complete with mugs of cocoa!). Mrs. Fiamingo told us how PJ struggled mightily with the concept of first drafts, how things didn't need to be -- indeed, couldn't be -- perfect the first time you hammer out your story, and that it would take several rewrites to get it a finished product. (I considered suggesting Mrs. Fiamingo read to the class the chapter from Anne LaMott's Bird By Bird called "Shitty First Drafts," but my finely honed sense of propriety figured out that this might not be a good call.)

And she talked about how much PJ is going to love a new idea they're going to introduce in the coming weeks: showing without telling. They're going to have the students act different emotions without speaking, notice the physical changes in the way they act and look, and write a character that exhibits these emotions physically and emotionally without explicitly saying the way the character acts.

Second grade, I remind you. There are college-level classes working on this idea. Hell, I'm still working on this idea daily! Would that I had this kind of exposure to the process when I was seven years old!

***

I was hurriedly ironing a shirt a couple of mornings ago as we were going through our usual, stress-filled weekday morning. (Piper would be late to school again.) Zuzu, already prepared to leave and with some free time on her hands, was creating a scene on the ottoman behind me, casting a couple of kitchen utensils with funny arms and legs as her actors. One of the absolute delights in Laura's and my life is to hear Zuzu weave one of these "scenes." Normally, there is armhair-raising peril involved -- someone is drowning in an ocean of lava (read: carpet) or dangerously hanging over a precipice (read: radiator cover), and a rescue team of Bitty Babies™ and Legos™ are needed at once to ensure a safe rescue. But this morning's scene was notable for its banality:

French Whip: Look what I found!

Spoon: What is it?

French Whip: A book!

Spoon: Wow! Are you going to read it?

French Whip: Yes! I'm going to take it home!

Spoon: You can't do that!

French Whip: Why not?

Spoon: It might belong to someone else!

French Whip: You're right! Maybe we should find out who it belongs to!

Suddenly, as if she'd forgotten something important, she threw down the utensils, boarded her Razor scooter -- who has time for walking around the house? -- and tore down the hallway to the bathroom.

"Mom!" she insisted. "You shouldn't take things that aren't yours!"

And after receiving her mother's agreement/confirmation, she re-boarded her vehicle and kick-pushed down to the living room.

I was overcome briefly with awe. It was a whole different kind of storytelling: the moral tale, acted out right in front of me (well, okay, behind me), complete with the moral stated distinctly to an audience at the end.

Susannah may not have the same inclinations toward writing that Piper has shown, but there is no question that we are a family of storytellers.