In the Beginning: Page Six

During my high school years, I learned how to write. I loved bathroom walls (where I created original limericks and would hide between the urinals so I could overhear the principal laugh and yell to the custodian, "Hey, Marv, have you read this one over here in stall three with the big turd? What a hoot!" This, of course, inspired me to write even more).

I also wrote poems to girls. Love poems . . . real ones with feeling, yearning, and plenty of words that rhymed with "hex" and "vicissitudes". I expanded my vocabulary. I purchased my first thesaurus. The girls swooned when I carried my thesaurus to class. They asked me to pronounce, "thesaurus", since it was a new word to most of them. Becky was first in line.

And somewhere over the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I wrote an epic poem about my small hometown. It was a satirization of every business and business owner (but heck, there weren't that many!). Somehow, copies of this epic actually fell into the hands of others, and the copies proliferated and were distributed. Some of the owners were mad. My parents heard about it and demanded to see my original manuscript (neatly typed in double-spaced PICA and ready for publication).

Now, to this day, I can still recall grand, sweeping segments of that poem about some of the individual businesses and owners. Here are two that come to mind:

And then there is the B & G

Where hardware goods are sold,

You can buy a hammer for a buck,

'Cause it's a hundred-and-five years old.

And when you die, see Mr. Bill,

He is the funeral man.

He's got something for every taste

On his simple "lay-away" plan.

When school began my junior year, I was a cult hero. Copies saturated the school. My parents, however, made me apologize to a few of the store owners who were, they insisted, offended by my wit. "Where's their sense of humor?" I wondered.

Eventually I was taken in by a kindly older woman named Mrs. Pohlman, who taught English and typing. "Mr. Outcalt . . . I want you in my typing class next semester," she insisted. "I'm going to give you a new outlet for your creative energies."