People ask me if I’ve always been a writer, and I usually answer that while I remember writing a story called “Amy’s Valentine” in fourth grade, not really much after that for decades. But in sorting through school stuff recently, I found a story that predates Amy by a year, “The Fourth of July.”
“Very interesting story,” Mrs. Ellwein or our student teacher wrote at the top. (Mrs. Ellwein’s comments on my final report card were less nuanced; I’d missed something like 50 days of school and she wrote that it was difficult to assess my performance because I’d been gone so much. Too bad she’d never done a cursory eye test on me; within a month of classes ending, I’d be diagnosed as legally blind uncorrected, and in my first pair of specs. My parents had been too busy with an unexpected set of twins born the previous August to notice much about what was going on with my eyes. But I digress.)
“Betty Chase was excited,” we learn. President Washington was going to give a special task to a girl and boy, and she and her brother are picked. The story could have used a little more tension and conflict, but I was after all only eight years old and had but one sheet of paper to work with.
I think of that little girl, sitting in Mrs. Ellwein’s classroom, not being able to see the blackboard or the teacher in front of the room but not knowing anyone else could see anything better, learning cursive, writing large so she could read it herself. There was a lot on her plate. She did okay.
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