As a kid, I wasn’t a talker. Silence was my friend. Except for around a few “safe” people – my family, a friend, a cousin — I never said much. I was a kid who always knew answers in class, but never raised my hand; who sat in the back, hid at recess, and fantasized about invisibility cloaks — long before Harry Potter.
Outside my quiet suburban home, the world was too loud, too bright, too much. I’d step on the school bus, and the sensory assault would begin. The babel of voices, the stench of diesel, flashing colors, too much movement and light. Every day started with panic pulses in my gut caused by anxiety. (Stanley, poor guy, has similar problems in my book, Stanley Will Probably Be Fine! Sorry, Stanley!)
I loved to read, though. And for some reason, I also loved… professional ice hockey. When I was eleven, I could have told you every statistic for every player on the New York Rangers or the Montreal Canadiens, my two favorite teams.
In sum, I was an odd kid.
Today, I might have been flagged for autism testing, but hey, I grew up in the dark ages. So I just straggled along as best I could, holding my nervous stomach and guarding my silence.
Until sixth grade.
Our teacher’s name was Mr. Simpson. He didn’t wear a suit and tie, like the other male teachers. Instead he wore flared jeans and leather motorcycle boots, had a handlebar mustache, and drove a powder-blue Mustang convertible. Even I knew that was cool. And during free periods, he’d play rock ballads on the classroom piano. He’d play as if he forgot we were listening.
Oh, but we were definitely listening.
Mr. Simpson talked to us as if we were grownups, which blew our collective 12-year-old minds. He was chill, laid back, real. He engaged us every way he could — through art, music, poetry, fiction, math, science, nature, sports.
One day, he wrote the lyrics to a Carole King song on the board. My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue. He twirled his chalk and said, “So what the heck does THAT mean?” We puzzled it out, line by line, until suddenly, for the first time, I understood what symbolism was. What a Eureka moment! I still remember how the sudden comprehension of it came to me like a physical, electric jolt.
Mr. Simpson bucked curriculum, bickered with the principal, said we were smart, wanted to push us. He would pace between our desks, dispensing life-advice. “Remember right now,” I remember him saying to us. “Remember what it feels like to be 12. Never forget childhood. Honor your inner magic. Hold onto who you are.”
The last thing I wanted to do was to hold onto that kid. I wanted to ditch her fast, and become someone confident and calm, someone whose heart didn’t race, whose tongue didn’t stumble.
But being twelve is a magic time. Add the right ingredients — a sudden change or challenge, or a special teacher — and deep, deep drama can happen.
Twelve is an age when the scales fall off your eyes and you see glimpses of the world as it really is for the first time. It’s when your heartstrings get tuned up to more exquisite, yet more painful, pitch.
Twelve is the epic age when you get unstuck, when you come loose from your family moorings, lose your way, gain new fears, confuse yourself, find yourself, start to change, start to morph… Maybe, if you’re lucky, start to bloom.
When I was twelve, because of Mr. Simpson’s unconventional teaching, I blossomed.
I started talking. I made my first real friends — Carrie R., Heather S., and Peggy R. I wrote a 42-page ‘novel.’ I belted out “Proud Mary” in the school musical. I wrote for the yearbook, read a medical encyclopedia (in case the hockey statistician thing didn’t work out, I was considering psychiatry). I worked ahead and finished most of the seventh grade math curriculum.
Sixth grade was sort of like my own personal Oliver-Sacks-style Awakening.
I don’t remember how Mr. S. created the proper conditions. Somehow he lessened the stress, loosened the reins. It does seem like magic, looking back. Who was that girl, the bloom who appeared, that year? She withered, once junior high hit. But sixth grade? Wow.
So.
Now that I write books for middle-graders, I think about Mr. Simpson a lot.
I think that perhaps he is WHY I am writing books for middle graders.
I remember him telling us something to the effect of: “The world’s rough, but full of enormous, beautiful potential. You are rough, but full of enormous, beautiful potential. You are going out into that rough world to do great things!”
I’m trying hard to share that message.
Especially with the kids who are afraid of the bus. The ones who can’t kick the soccer ball worth a darn. They’re my homeys. They are standing right there on the cusp of their own blossoming. (It can happen!) I want to show them a glimmer of their own potential, of the great uniqueness of them, of what they could maybe offer this rough yet beautiful world.
Because there’s some kind of crazy magic inside humans. There is!
And hey, Mr. Simpson. If by some miracle, you’re out there reading this?
Thanks for the best year ever.
______
(a version of this piece originally appeared in Kidliterati)