Dear ,
 

Last week, in one of my Under Construction classes via Zoom, one of my writers told us about a book she thought we'd love: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. She held it up for us to see, and, immediately, another writer held up her copy of this book to "second the emotion." "It keeps getting sold out on Amazon," one of them said.
 

Of course I had to check it out!

True story: I read through the book the evening I got it (perfect for bedtime) and chose the conversation I wanted to share with you. Then, when I went to Amazon to grab a screenshot of the description to share, I saw that it included the very same bit of dialogue I'd selected:

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" asked the mole.

"Kind," said the boy.

While there were a number of strong contenders, this was the one I'd decided to go with. First, because "kind" was my word of the year for 2020, and I am not done with it yet. And second, because it immediately reminded me of a passage from Patricia Hampl's A Romantic Education that I adore.

I still smile when I think of the time a number of years ago—1994? 1995?—when I used this excerpt as a prompt in one of my creative writing classes at Queens. One of my students wrote that she had wanted to be the tooth fairy, and drew the most delightful illustrations of the tooth fairy's outfit and accessories. 

My childhood career of choice changed a number of times, and each was much more prosaic than tooth fairy—a teacher, a writer, an editor, a therapist, a Girl Scout camp director, a Broadway singer and dancer . . . I've spent time engaging in some semblance of all of these, if you count my performances in high school musicals and my tap dancing on the Blumenthal stage with my adult dance class to "Papa Loves Mambo" at the Morrison YMCA's yearly recital. (We got a lot less applause than the four-year-old class, but who can blame the audience for that?)

But I was humbled by the answer the Boy gave his friend Mole. There's more than one way to interpret that question, far above and beyond career choice. I'm glad Charlie Mackesy imagined another interpretation. What the world needs now, I believe, is all the people it can get who want to be kind when they grow up. (Because, after all, we are all still growing. Or can be, if we choose.)

How about you? Scroll on down to read Patricia Hampl's thoughts on the matter, and then use the prompt to write about your own, or anyone else's, childhood aspirations, including those of one of your characters.

Love and light,

Maureen

WordPlay Opportunities

Featured Writing

an Excerpt from

A Romantic Education

by

Patricia Hampl

I wanted to be a writer. Didn’t everybody? I didn’t think this would stop me from also being a doctor, or a microbiologist. (I liked putting something that appeared to be one thing under a lens to see the crammed, multiple life: a strand of hair, for instance, as our biology teacher demonstrated.) I could also see being a teacher, or a nun (the kind that wore sandals and never spoke), or, in a particularly long-lived fantasy, a concert pianist. These occupations and many others—actress, oceanographer, tree surgeon—fascinated me.

Writing, on the other hand, was not fascinating; it was something I just did. In compensation, though, it possessed a reality none of these other occupations, with their glamour, could approach. What after all was an oceanographer? A person who looked at oceans? Looked at them hard? And then? Wrote about them. And I didn’t have to wait until I grew up to be a writer, an advantage over oceanography. I could sit at the dining room table and ask my mother how to spell the hard words.

Later, in college, I was proud to be “majoring in English,” which to me was like choosing everything for your subject. The allure of any occupation, anything at all, seemed always to circle back to writing. Because writing, I sensed, let you in; it subsumed these other things, oceans and microscopes, teachers, dining room tables. Writing was the soul of everything else. Being a Catholic, I found the word soul came easily; it still does. Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

I wrote poetry: it was easier than prose. In high school I wrote frantically—about the lilacs, about the sunset, about there being no God, about arson and madness. I was phenomenally sane. The fact that people went crazy or were tormented—a favorite word—was a marvelous discovery. It confirmed something, I couldn’t say what.

I was breathless with lyricism. It was as if I was clutching in my bare hand a lilac, an arsonist, a tormented lesbian, the reddest sunset (I wrote about all these things) and crying, Me, me, me! It was the most satisfying, exultant message I had.

That was lyricism. It was also adolescence, the personal discovery of everything. Of lilacs, which had always been there in the back yard, down the neighborhood alleys where they cloaked the garbage cans and hugged the sides of old garages too small for the finned fish of that decade’ s cars. For the first ‘time the lilacs came to me nostalgically because I noticed them. Nostalgia and the living, immediate lilac met in a first sensation of adulthood, the knowledge that objects carry their dense bundles of significance dense bundles of significance out of unconsciousness all the way to—I could almost sense it ahead—the end of the line. To death. I encountered the fragility of the life around me. In this way, objects gradually became images. 

    Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education

Learn more about Patricia Hampl and A Romantic Education here.