How G.I.Joe Helped Me Become A Writer

The year was nineteen seventy-eight, and I was the tender age of eight years old. Sitting at my desk in that second grade classroom full of boys and girls who were my classmates, we waited for class to start.  

Mrs. Smart, my favorite teacher, and one of the greatest ladies I have ever met to this day, rose from her chair and walked over to the chalk board saying, "Children, today we are going to write a story."  Then she picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote on the black board, "If I could be any toy, I would be...", then turning to face us she instructed us to write this sentence on the top of our papers, and then finish the thought. There were groans from around the room as  my classmates murmured about our assignment, but not from me.  

School was never much fun for me, as I never really got into math, science or even gym for that matter.  But when it came to reading, and writing, these things seemed to make sense to me where everything else didn't.  So, grasping my number two pencil and running my small hands over the piece of paper a couple of times to smooth it down, I began to work.  In my childish handwriting I wrote, "If I could be any toy, I would be..." and then I sat back in my wooden school chair and began to seriously think about which toy I would choose.

I loved toys, (still do actually) and had quite a few of them as a child.  Living in the suburbs, my two brothers and I never lacked for things to entertain us.  Actually one of my favorite activities as a child was spending hours in my bedroom, making up adventures with all of my toys.  So you see I had a great frame of reference when it came to this writing assignment.  As I sat there thinking about which of my toys I liked the most, and would possibly want to be, it hit me.  I would be a G.I. Joe!  I had a bunch of these, and they were like my best friends.  There was always a world that needed saving, and my G.I. Joes were just the guys to do it.

Once I had made the decision about which toy I would most like to be, I got to work writing.  This is what I wrote on that day:

If I could be any toy, I would be a G.I. Joe.  Because the little boy who had me would love me and play with me and drag me through the dirt, and make me fight off the bad guys in this world.  The little boy who had me would spend a bunch of time with me, because I am the best toy ever.

I finished my writing assignment and turned in my paper, filled with the satisfaction of a job well done. It felt almost as if there was something inside of me which had come alive as I penned those words.  The reason is because what I had written that day had not come out of my head, but had come directly from my heart. This was the first time I had created something in this way, and it felt good. 

My second grade writing assignment had given me the opportunity to share just a little bit of who I was as a person, and while I couldn't have expressed to anyone at that time what writing meant to me, now forty years later I can.  Why do you think that I can do that now, when I couldn't have done it back then?  Well, that is because now I have come to realize that I am a writer, and as a writer that's what I do, share a little bit of whom I am.  Plus I'm entering a contest found at http://youareawriter.com and blogging is the avenue I have chosen in which to enter the contest.