When it came time to finally clear out the old family homestead at Loop Drive, we had to empty every cupboard and drawer at last. I was enormously surprised (even awed) to find this tucked away in the kitchen, along with some ancient clippings of comics and some tracings I had made from Cinders, a book to which I felt some attachment (see elsewhere in this blog). It was a collection of 'plays' (skits would be more accurate) that I had written and bound together with black thread. They are the earliest thing surviving that I had ever written. The comics and the tracings found with them suggest I wrote them in Fourth Grade (1972 -1973), but my feeling is that at least some of them are somewhat older. I know I had forgotten them and I bet Mom (who had obviously tucked them away) had as well.
Every play, of course, had a Cast, to which I speculatively attached members of my class, though of course they were never 'produced'. The Cake was a beast fable involving lions, a fox, an owl, and a stolen cake. Cinderwitch was merely the adaptation of a Sunday Broom Hilda comic (the clipping of the old comic was with it!). A Day in the Jungle is about animal friends quarreling about what to eat and resolving to each his own. A Talk with Some Shell-Dwellers has a boy going to the ocean and visiting a bunch of different shellfish and ending up with an environmental message to keep the waters clean. At 2 or 3 pages each, they were morality plays of exemplary economy.
Looking back on these yellowed pages now brings up many old memories, of the skits the different classes would put on for the school in the cafeteria, of the classmates I had considered for the roles, even of the very space and feel of the Fourth Grade room. These withered leaves evoke both pride and shame, and recall my nascent yearning to do something and be someone among my peers. "Sing me a song of a lad that is gone; say could that lad be I ..."
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