It was Christmas Day. As we were leaving my parents’ house after a day spent eating, unwrapping gifts, and stoking the fire, my dad went up to the attic to retrieve one more present – my childhood memories.
It took several trips, lugging Rubbermaid bins down the stairs and through the house. The tops wouldn’t stay on. Years of extreme hot and cold from an attic life had done its damage.
“They’re yours now,” he said.
I wasn’t certain what I would find, but a faded scrap of masking tape had my name on it, so I knew they were mine.
For a couple of days, they bounced around the trunk until I remembered they were there. In a moment of rare quiet, I hauled them into the garage and opened them up like I was unearthing some prehistoric bones from the terra.
Inside each bin I discovered who I used to be. There were kindergarten pastel drawings of cowboys and Indians, my fourth grade report on Honda’s 1984 CRX, and a Roman numeral quiz that proved I hadn’t studied. I read my third grade paragraph about the Incas and cringed at my sixth grade poetry with topics like lacrosse and go-carts. There was also a long lost book called The Music Address Book, which I had bought with the hopes of increasing my autograph collection. Each bit of paper conjured a memory. Who I was, and who I wasn’t. Whatever I created had been stuffed inside those weatherproof tombs, and I was peeling back the layers.
But at the bottom of one of the bins, the construction paper and Good Job! stickers stopped. A part of me felt like I was playing with a hornet’s nest since I knew what was at the base. They had to be. I poked anyway, pushing at the thin, comb walls, wanting to investigate, hoping I wouldn’t get stung.
At first, it was just a fifth grade test on the human body systems, and a three-minute speech from seventh grade on the Russo-Japanese War. But with more digging, I saw the crimson ink and the rubber-banded stack. They were there, hidden – every single one of my high school essays, freshman through senior year. The piles of messy analysis and attempts at thesis-driven work looked just like I remembered them, mediocre. On one assignment, I saw Mr. Wood’s feedback in bits of oxblood: “Absurd inattention to punctuation casts a severe shadow of doubt about writer’s skill – rampant use of clichés undermines essay’s potential, colloquial diction. Learn this comma rule: DC, IC.”
On another essay, what looked like a “B-” has been crossed out with a single scarlet line. In its place, the same Mr. Wood had written a bolder “C-.” On a parody of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, I was graded as follows: “content B, mechanics D.”
As a sophomore English student, I didn’t need to read William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” to feel adrift. For me, high school English felt like a foreign language. Maybe it was my immaturity or boredom – or both. But school was hard. It’s not lost on me now that it took me some time to get up to speed. But my weak performance upstream never slowed me down. It forced me to keep paddling and to kick a bit harder. I learned to hold my breath and streamline my stroke. And now, what was once so painful brings great joy.
In 1991, that middle-of-the-road student never dreamed of teaching or sitting across from Mr. Wood in a meeting. Yet today, both are true. And for sixteen years, we’ve been working together. This year, he’s even my son’s freshman advisor. When Atticus found out, he seemed apprehensive.
“Dad, he went to Princeton.”
“I know,” I said. “But he’ll teach you a lot.”
Even as an adult, the lessons still come. Two years ago, Mr. Wood sent me a text: Hey, do you and Dawn want to go see Ringo?
Sure, I replied. I’ll bring Atticus.
For years I had avoided seeing the backbeat king from Liverpool. He seemed cartoonish, a cliché of himself. All of his “peace and love” and “Yellow Submarine” mantras felt overdone. Despite this, he had remained a hero of mine. His style. His wit. I even wrote Ringo a letter when I was twelve, thanks to that same address book that had been stuffed inside the Rubbermaid bin for years. I remember it took six months. But one day, an envelope showed up with a black and white photograph and his autograph, folded over. It hangs in my office today.
When Atticus and I got to the concert, I kept looking at my ticket as the ushers directed us closer and closer to the stage. When we couldn’t walk any further, we were at our seats in the second row.
Between songs, it all came smashing together. The past. The present. The kid who couldn’t figure out how to write an essay, standing with his own son a few feet away from two of his mentors. It was all right there – in front of me. It was a moment.
I told a friend afterwards that it was life-changing. She asked, “For you – or for Atticus?”
For both of us.
If you visit my classroom, you’ll see I have four of my old Mr. Wood essays pinned up on a bulletin board. There’s a D-, a C-, a B-, and an A-, which was a rewrite. Each one tells a story.
It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish.
