Is there such a thing as forgetting
how to write?
I’ve never, ever thought so.
Because from the time I was a
schoolgirl, being dragged outside for gym, I wrote in my head. I wrote in my
head because in the classroom, where I was learning, I didn’t need to write. I
was learning, for Pete’s sake! I knew I would—and could—write about what I was
learning, but first I had to learn it. I was one of those weird children: I
liked to pay attention. I believed the teachers had something there for me.
Honestly, they mostly did. So I learned.
I learned because then I could
score well on tests. And I could write about what I learned. That’s the kind of kid I was—one who liked to learn. And why? Because
learning was the brain’s version of eating. And I liked to eat. Who didn’t?
So why wouldn’t the brain want to
eat, as well? The Krebs cycle was a cupcake for the frontal lobe. The geological
epochs spoke to the medulla: the earth breathes and we breathe. Something about
the earth beats and our hearts beat. I was always sure, as a sixth-grade
biology student, that there was a correspondence between our physical needs and
the needs of the brain. I mean, I guess, that I thought we needed to learn. That is, we needed to learn if
we wanted to fully live.
That’s how I felt about being in
the classroom, anyway. I mean, of course it got boring. And as I grew past elementary and
middle school I began to recognize mediocrity in teachers (and I vowed that, if
I ever became a teacher I would damn well not
be mediocre about it) as well as a certain brilliance, or at the very least, a facility
that some teachers had.
This came to be even more true when
I was in college, then graduate school and then seminary. The very best
teachers made you want to learn, made you want to postpone that endless need
and urge and compulsion to write, postpone it long enough, just long enough, that you
could write for them--about what you’d learned, learning from them.
But back to elementary school: Every
day that I was dragged outside for gym, there was just nothing that I wanted to
learn. Nothing. It wasn’t that I had—or have ever had—an aversion to physical
activity. In fact, I love it. I was a dancer till my early twenties, then
became a serious yoga practitioner and still am, as well as a yoga teacher. I
far more trust my body than I trust my brain—or, to quote the bumper sticker, ‘I
try not to believe every thing I think.’
But elementary school gym class?
With Mrs. Crochina? And Miss Pettigrew? And that dumb-ass Mr. Crochina who
subbed when his wife was out on maternity leave? I never cared to learn their
games. So I just wrote stories in my head while I was waiting to run around the
stupid orange cones or waiting to be the next walloped on the head in “Duck,
Duck, Goose” or waiting for my turn to stand at home plate swinging a
plastic bat at a Whiffle ball. Sheesh, puhleeze!
Now I know—these decades hence—that
Mr. and Mrs. Crochina and Miss Pettigrew and Miss Hill and Mrs. Maru were my very
first writing teachers. They didn’t know it, but they were. Because Mr. and Mrs.
Crochina (and I did like that long vertical groove on the outside of her thighs), Miss Pettigrew and Mrs. Maru
bored me to tears. I didn’t care about gym and stupid games. I had ballet class
where I had to learn French words in order to make my body move the right way.
But my gym teachers set my mind
free so that it could wander and wander free. So much of gym class was about
waiting: for the next girl to get out of the water so I could have a timed lap,
for the next girl to run the hurdles so I could encounter my own, for the
offensive team to be replaced by the defensive team (and vice versa) in flag
football, in basketball and in softball.
These days, I just want to take a
gym class. No, not a class at a gym. A gym class, one in which you must stand
and wait and daydream and be impatient and let your mind wander because there is not one single thing interesting
that is going on. And therefore, in the absence of other things to learn,
you learn how to write.
Sometimes I worry that I’ve
forgotten how do that, what with all the good stuff there is to learn in this
world.
But then I remind myself of the dullness
of Dodgeball and Mrs. Crochina’s interesting thighs. And I remember that I
haven’t quite forgotten how to write.
