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Me and Writing
This was the summer that I think I became a writer. I was thirteen years old. I wore steel-rimmed glasses and I was a very 1)solemn boy. Not that I was sad, but I simply was paying attention. I'd been given a typewriter by my Uncle George, when he got an electric. He gave me his old Underwood typewriter and I set it up in the 2)basement. I had a secret place under the stairs behind a 3)stack of sheet rock. I sat in there and wrote where my parents could not see me because they were worried, you know, that I didn't go outside. And they believed in the 4)illusion of a balanced life, you know, you do a little bit of this, you do a little bit of that. I just wanted to do one thing. I just wanted to find things to write about.
I liked to write about 5)tornadoes: Tornadoes, which come out of a peaceful summer day in the Midwest. And the sky's blue and then suddenly it's dark as night and this great snake-like cloud comes slithering across the 6)landscape, 7)smashing houses at random, destroying this one, leaving this standing. I liked that idea.
I wrote a story, a sort of 8)autobiographical story, about a family from New York, a microbiologist and his actress wife, and their son, who looked, and walked, and talked, and thought, and felt exactly like me. I sat in the 9)backseat and they were driving across the Midwest, and they forgot me... at a gas station. We stopped for a rest stop... and they forgot me, and they drove away. I walked up the road that they had driven and suddenly the sky turned dark and... a tornado came up and it picked me up and it carried me and dropped me, uninjured, in the yard of a 10)sanctified 11)Brethren family. I knocked on the door and a woman in a white 12)satin gown holding a flaming 13)torch came out and asked me what I wanted. And I was going to tell them that I had to leave to look for my parents and then the dog spoke to me. The dog said, "Stay." So, I stayed. But still, I missed the life of 14)glamour that I had known on New York's 15)exclusive Upper West Side. I love to write stories like that.
I sat there at my Underwood typewriter, but I wished that something real would happen.
That was the summer that my cousin, Helen-Marie, came to stay with us suddenly. She was seventeen. She was four years older than I and I'd always admired her. She was lovelier than the rest of us. The rest of us had our family's looks; we had 16)homely faces and she was pretty. She had 17)blonde hair, a rarity in our family.
Then I wrote a story about her; about a girl who is cooking lunch at home one day and a woman in a white satin dress holding a flaming torch bursts in through the door, and it startles the girl so much that she drops the 18)cast iron skillet on her dog and the dog bites her and she gets an 19)incurable blood disease from this. Doctors give her two weeks to live, and then, on top of everything, a tornado comes in and it blows the roof off the house and it 20)impales four blades of grass in her side. And there's something on that grass that cures that blood disease. Medical science has never seen anything like it. She's cured. She comes home. And that night the dog 21)scratches on her door, and the dog says, "Aren't you curious to know what it was on the grass that cured that blood disease?" I sort of liked the story.
