I remember racing home from Ponderosa School with a pocket full of neatly folded magazine pages baring the souls and rich colorful faces of nicely aged antique cars and the wheels that got them to their place in American history.
I stole the pictures…saw them in a Weekly Reader Book Club order form magazine sitting on the teachers desk and couldn’t shake the vision or vibration from the normally extremely clean path and life my seven year old legs led.
Mrs. Keefe, my closest friends David Brown, Derek Mullins and Joe Kakowski nor I had a clue what would protrude from the vividly clear but hauntingly too abstract painting tossed at me like a water balloon; all I heard in my head was, “Go home and write…”
Write? I hated reading! On purposely I flunked tests so I wouldn’t have to make my way to thicker thoughts about Huck Finn, Romeo and Juliet and later in life Hamlet, 1984 and eleventh grade Current Events. My first comic book was slammed together by Gene Simmons of KISS but I never read it. Today it sits untouched in the very bag the store clerk put it in…
Talk about feeling out of place!
If you weren’t diving into Batman, Superman and The Archies and couldn’t find enough imagination in your skull to walk into Dr. Seuss’ theater of the mind—the only thing left was to write your own ten act play then quickly hide it in the third cardboard box to the right in the very dark and damp attic above your bed.
I’ll write it ten thousand times; Mrs. Keefe was the first to recognize my mental disorder. Rather than report me to the principal and child welfare, the aging woman so many cherished embraced my weakness by taking this unknown passion to write and giving it to the heart that screamed to bring words to life.
She gave me the names of the characters from the books they studied and softly asked, “Will you please write me a story about these people? This is who they are, what they look like and how they’re accepted or not accepted by the other characters in the book. After you picture them, take your pencil and write…I want to hear how you as an author bring them into the world so others in this room can see what you feel.”
Not all teachers believed in the concept. I wasted twelve long years of a free trip toward something successful on being an invisible head strong wild child that had no clue how to get the energy out…so I soaked in
creative flow with no place to go. By the 5th and 6th grade Mr. Barone had me copying dictionary pages because it was the only way my imagination felt challenged enough to succeed in a world oversaturated by teachers with big bright red pens that said, “You suck.”
The only way to free myself was through music. How dare I think of writing! With writing comes harsh judgment from brothers and sisters, moms and dads and those you thought were your friends. I would never put a pencil on paper in public…so I’d race home to quickly fall asleep, believing if I controlled what I dreamt, it would be equal to an author giving life to a page that once belonged to a living tree. Music put me to sleep. Take it to the Limit and New Kid in Town from The Eagles were my drug. John Denver pressuring us to believe in a Rocky Mountain High painted pictures in ways Mrs. Keefe introduced.
I know! I want to be a radio Disc Jockey! I’ll sit beside the greats of music and help them bring their creative outpourings to the forefront of a listeners next thought. I’ll be Wolfman Jack and Casey Kasum mixed in with Kurt Anthony of KOOK. Why read books when radio people tell stories? Making it even more difficult to turn my back on broadcasting was a radio serial called Chicken Man and every night on KGHL they featured Radio Mystery Theater.
I had finally found my oasis.
Every radio show, every television and or radio commercial written and produced by me today carries the very vision Mrs. Keefe planted in my field of corn. None of it has calmed the roar my heart bakes into the footprints of always changing sands. It doesn’t matter how much air I pump into the tires holding up a thirty one year old radio career, it’ll never support the system meant to be displayed.
Secretly and silently I’ve written since the second grade; every word rushed to an impatient shadow…
People constantly ask why I speak so much about daily writing—because I’m not the only super soaker of thought becoming a rhyme or tale, nourishment for personal growth or an adventure through measures of mediums called blogs, Books on Demand and Kendle, Nook and IPad. You don’t need a publishing company to hang your gallery of pictures painted by an imagination you’ve carried all these years and the only thing you’ve ever offered it is a single thought, “You suck!”
The day has finally arrived; its time to give yourself permission to write.
I can’t explain in words what it feels like to hit Amazon.com and see two books written by these tattered and torn fingers that have spent an entire lifetime scraping away mountain sized walls that kept me from doing what I’ve always had the right to do…to write.
Why wouldn’t I want to take what Mrs. Keefe gave me and place it someplace special for you to steal it? Grab the pictures and race home! If you see it, feel it, taste it, hear it smell it…there are words in your heart waiting to describe it.
The greatest gift you can share is your imagination…
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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