Once Upon a Time

Not too long ago, my ex-husband opened an old filing cabinet. In addition to appliance manuals from appliances that were dead before his current appliances were specks of metal in the foundries of their birth and utility bills from 2001, he found an assortment of my old papers. A few from high school that I was proud enough to keep, including a satirical rhyming poem about the Iran-Contra Scandal (holla, 1980s!), an essay on Equivocation in Macbeth, and this treasure:

11th Grade English essay on "Death of a Salesman," 1988.  Probably the nicest compliment I ever got from a teacher, and my favorite teacher at that, Mrs. Paula Bray. As much as I didn't enjoy American literature, I loved that class because she listened and she cared and I felt like she was the only teacher who did.

The high school essays were, of course, handwritten on college ruled paper, single sided and probably rewritten a dozen times to be perfect because UNLIKE KIDS TODAY we didn't get to type them on the computer and had to use ACTUAL CURSIVE WRITING which required levels of concentration and focus that kids today can't even dream of, and yet we were able to accomplish these feats of penmanship whilst listening to Prince and Madonna on our Sony Boomboxes. But I digress.

There are a handful of undergrad papers, too, mostly ones with scrawled complements from professors. One stapled-together packet appears to not have been an assignment. Evidently, at some point I had gotten into a debate with some professor about the nature of poetry and took the initiative to write three handwritten pages entitled, "Some Ideas on the Function of Poetry," and turned it in to my professor, who returned it stapled to five handwritten pages entitled, "Response to Some Ideas on the Function of Poetry," which concludes with the somewhat ambiguous praise, "Well, for whatever my comments are worth, it seems your essay provoked a response, which is a commendation for it." He? She? did not sign the response, and I have absolutely no memory of the debate, the class, or the professor. But I definitely had what a friend calls "lady balls" to lay out a theory of aesthetics as an undergrad to my professor. Props to you, Undergrad Diana!

Not just ballsy but really, really pretentious. "It can never be didactically assumed that consensus indicates truth"??? Present Diana would redline Past Diana's writing with a whole box of Sharpies.  I'm also a little impressed--and somewhat alarmed--by evidence that I was definitely brainier in 1991 than I am today. Past Diana may have written some tortured prose, but clearly she did more with her brain than feed it cat videos and play Scrabble. "The good poem is the poem whose message is the possibility of messages, which communicates the possibility of discourse" was written by the same person who presently struggles to form complete sentences before 10 a.m. 

The grad school folder is stuffed with essays and reading responses. One professor had written letters to two of the authors we studied and they wrote back, so I have copies of the typed letters from Robert Bly and Linda Bierds (the class was called "Deep Image Poetry," and was one of my favorites from grad school). I've always thought of my M.A. in Literature as my "Recreational Degree" since I did it because I wanted to and enjoyed every minute of talking about literature with other book nerds. Of course, now that I think about it, "recreational degree" is a nice way of saying "$10,000 book club with a really fancy participation certificate at the end."

The folder that I opened with the most trepidation was the one labelled "Short Stories." It contains handwritten copies of short stories from seventh grade to young adulthood. How cringe-y can that folder be?

Very, very cringe-y.

"Where the Fir Trees Meet," of seventh grade vintage, is a teen drama occult classic of a skiing trip turned violent, in which a pair of candles are thrown through the air, creating the sort of magical explosion typically found in a Michael Bay movie.

"A Week at the Park," from eighth grade, is a period romantic drama of every period romantic cliche you can fit onto seven wide-ruled pages: the aristocratic woman with the rich fiance that seems desirable but is secretly violent when jealous, who manages to fall in love with a "vagabond" (who somewhat contradictorily has his own house) in a single five minute conversation but ultimately knocks her fiance out with a brick (okay, that's not a rom-com cliche, but it probably should be) and flees with The Love of Her Life to the Bahamas to choose a life of happy poverty as a teacher over boring wealth and respectability.

"Family Reunion" is an Agatha Christie style whodunit, heavily influenced by the game Clue, which I played a lot in junior high, in which a family of eight gather for a reunion at Rainbow House (in which...wait for it...each room is painted a different color because that is totally how rich people decorate) only to be murdered off one by one by (spoiler alert) the maid, who turns out to be their mother who was forced to give up her first child for adoption and thought her subsequent children weren't as perfect as the one she gave away, so she posed as a maid to murder them. Speaking with the hindsight of over sixteen years of motherhood, hahahahahaha. Yeah right. After the second child, your standards of "perfection" get lowered from "actually perfect" to "if I can still see some of the carpet you can probably eat off that floor." There's no way Elsa Jones had eight children and retained any discernible trace of perfectionism--or ever voluntarily posed as a maid.

And then there's "The Castle of Le Breaux." I saw this story from seventh grade and immediately remembered, not the story itself (I think we've established that my memory stinks) but how proud I was of this story when I wrote it in 1983. Seventh grade Diana thought this story was the bomb and that it had a genius plot twist at the end. Seventh grade Diana was partially right--it may not have been the bomb, but it was a bomb. For your viewing pleasure, I present: The Castle of Le Breaux.

It's kind of an accomplishment to cram treasure hunting, creepy castles and alien abduction into two pages of middle school cursive and still find room for a nice, gaping plot hole.

I haven't finished going through the Short Stories folder. There's only so much the fragile writer's ego can handle in a sitting. I may need a week or two (and a glass or two of wine) before I'm ready to tackle sixteen-year-old Diana's essay, "Some Thoughts on Love." You just know that's a steaming pile of teenage angst, although at least it probably doesn't involve aliens, exploding candles, or murderous maids.