School Days

I entered Kindergarden at the school just up the street from our apartment -- Marlon Hills Elementary School. It was a fairly new school at the time, fresh with new archetecture and new ideas. I had Miss Reynolds and Mrs. Barr as my most memorable teachers there. I recall many things from that time in snatches of memory.

Some of the children were rocking a portable backstop on top of the hill east of the school while other children were hanging onto the bar and being lifted into the air. I tried to reach for the swinging bar but the backstop was built of chain-link fencing and I grabbed the twisted end barbs of wire instead. I tore open my left hand on the palm just below the index finger and ran back into the school. A teacher stopped me in the hall and was about to lecture me about not being where I was supposed to be when I showed her my hand in proof. She blanched and then hustled me into the school nurse. I bear the scar from that little incident to this day.

It was around this time that my family moved into our first own home. It was south of the elementary school and we loved it. My father would borrow a truck and take both of us boys out south of town to gather rocks for the landscaping he had determined to do out back. We really made quite a show of our back yard with a two level retaining wall and steps and a lot of natural scrub oak. We had a strawberry patch in the north-west corner.

My First Fight

I was, even then, something of a nerd. By fourth grade I was carrying a briefcase to school. This was long before backpacks came into fashion. Being picked on was inevitable.

My own personal tormentor was a red-haired, freckle-faced terror named, of all things, Rusty. He use to push me around in general. My father, of course, wouldn't allow his boy to be a wimp. Dad went out and bought two pair of boxing gloves and strapped one pair on me and one on himself. "You're gonna have to fight him sometime," he said to me. "You might as well know how to do it." I wasn't so sure this was a good idea. Pain was not my strong point. "You won't feel a thing," Dad said. "Not while your in the middle of the fight anyway." He showed me how to hold my hands to protect my face; told me to forget about gut punches and concentrate on my opponents face; and gave me a proper fighting stance. We sparred for several days and I learned the ropes but somehow I still feared the fated event.

It wasn't long after that that I ratted him out to the teacher about some infraction or other. He caught up with me after school as I was walking across the school parking lot toward my church which was practically adjacent to the school. We stopped on the church lawn, I handed my brief case (at fourth grade, mind you!) to my friend Steve and turned with my guard up.

To my utter amazement, Rusty put both his fists up to either side of his head, leaving his face wide open. Apparently, Rusty's father hadn't taught him anything about boxing. I went for the face with a seemingly endless series of right jabs right for his nose with an occasional left uppercut to his chin just to keep him guessing. It wasn't long before the poor kid was staggering. By the time the good church woman waded in and stopped the fight, poor Rusty had a pretty good bloody nose. My mother was at the church at the time and I was delivered up to her. Emotionally spent, I wept like a baby. Mother applied cold water to my face and took me home.

It was my first and last fight. No one ever bothered the kid with the briefcase again. I learned a lot from that episode -- not the least of which was that my father had been right: in the middle of the fight, I never felt a single blow that kid threw.

My First Novel

I wrote my first novel while I was in elementary school. I had determined that the way one wrote a novel was to keep writing pages every day and when you had enough pages, you had a book. So, with determination, I set about my task. Here, for the first time, the story is presented in full:

At this point it was time for the second page of my epic ...

At this point, not quite to the bottom of my second ruled page of pencilled epic, I experienced my first case of writer's block. Unable to think of anything further to say, I did what so many writers have done over the years -- I just signed it 'by Tracy Hickman' and let it end.

I looked on those two whole pages and knew, in that moment, that I would never be a writer.

However, the future was somewhat set from that time. I ran across the following poem I wrote in elementary school: