I can’t help falling in love with my Strunk and White Word-Love
Roses.
This bouquet is made from the pages of Elements of Style, a tiny little text book that fed generations of writers wisdom and inspired them to exceptional writing. I also relate to it from the teacher/student perspective – all those red pens smashing the hopes of young writers.
Will you give me just a moment for a story?
When I was in the fifth grade I was in Mrs. Wilson’s English class. We were brand new to Middle School – it started in Glen Ridge in the fifth grade - and it was a sad time for me: students were discerning who was cool and who wasn’t cool and although my winning personality USED to get me a ticket to the cool kids’ lunch table, now I was a cast off and felt very sad and lonely about that AND next, the unbelievable happened.
Mrs. Wilson took a group of seven or eight of us out of the classroom to discuss and correct our sub-par first papers we turned into her. I was horrified. There I sat with, wait, let me remember.
There are only two who I remember because I had my head down almost the whole time in that small room. Sitting here in 2012 I can still see the way the light was shining, I can still see the wooden walls, seeming to mock me.
Beth Williams, who became a dear friend was there as was Perry Keane, who tried valiantly to comfort me when I couldn’t hold the tears back any more. Perry and I always sat side by side when teachers alphabetized seating charts and after that episode, I carried the shame of being pulled out of the class with him by my side so we never became the good friends we probably could have been.
Perry, if you are out there reading, thank you for trying to comfort me.
I may write to make my living now, but back then I was a little girl who had excelled and now was being told my work was “fair” at best and I believed I was destined for a life of failure and the dreaded red pen would dangle relentlessly above my word-loving page. Mrs. Wilson might have put a slash through that last sentence and shouted “RUN ON!” with her red pen.
My writing students often give me the feedback they haven’t
written
in YEARS because of the dreaded red pen and through my teaching are
reborn as word-loving writers.
For this, and many other reasons, I love these red roses. The color and flower of love and the washing away of “mistakes” in our writing and “bad form” in our writing: Strunk and White and all our writing teachers truly only hoped to make us into better writers.
Thank you, Mrs. Wilson, for believing in me after that fateful day.
And thank you for casting me as the Cook in The Dispeptic Ogre. While that memory was also tarnished by the meaning I bestowed upon it and the choices I made afterwards, I now see it as cherished and lovely.
I am even posting this photo, where I see the roses very clearly and I also see on the right side of my face, the fading pink slash mark of my surgeon. It could almost be
mistaken as an indentation, but it is a part of my scar.
It must be a day to celebrate mistakes made whole. It must be a day to take hurts and integrate them, choosing to see them, finally, as just right.
This post was inspired in part by Art Every Day Month. Click the link here or over <--- there, on the image.
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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott
