A year later I am sitting next to my dad on a yellow school bus on the way to the Mystic Aquarium. My dad is a middle school science teacher. Every year he takes his 7th grade class to Mystic and this year he talked to my teachers and decided to take me along too.
This is a white coach bus, but I think you get the picture.
The previous week I had spent every night watching my VHS tapes of Animal Planet and Discovery Channel and National Geographic specials on orcas, dolphins, whales, penguins, or anything else that lived in water. After following my dad’s class around on the guided tour I am free to explore the aquarium. I drag my dad around from exhibit to exhibit marveling at the animals and spouting off every fact that I know. At the end of the day I sit back down next to my dad and get out my journal. Every week I have to fill a few pages in my journal and then in class my teachers go over what I have written and help me correct it. I spend the bus ride back from mystic writing a poem for every animal I have seen that day.
Soon after becoming enamored with reading I tried my hand at writing. Initially my stories were a fun way to record what I saw in my imagination. However, as I learned to read at a higher level I saw a disparity between the quality of the books I read and the quality of writing I produced. As ridiculous as it is for an 8 year old to hold their writing to the same standard as a professional author it still bothered me. I drifted away from writing stories and began to write poems.
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Poetry challenged me to express myself in a more concise and artful way. Two of the poems I wrote about Mystic were used as part of a larger project later that year. One about a sea turtle, with its “bumpy bowling ball shell,” was mounted on a wall in my classroom. Another about the lion fish, “the proud king of the sea,” I transcribed onto a life size drawing of a lion fish, which still hangs in my grandmothers living room. Encouraged by my teachers and parents I continued to write poetry and eventually ventured back into short stories.
The Price of Charity is a short story I wrote in seventh grade when assigned to write a story inspired by Poe.