"Best" writing

Well, word here has gotten out about my thesis (thanks to our new librarian - who is a former BSU grad and who did me a major favor in proof reading my thesis - so she deserves quite a bit of credit too). When told about my writing, one of my colleagues in the English department (who wishes to write her own memoir one day) announced, “Well, I am a better writer than him!”

This surprised me. Not that she thought that she is a better writer, but that a professional would have such a competitive nature about writing. If she feels that way about writing, what does she convey to her students? Of course, she might have been joking, but it was an odd reaction nonetheless.

Why is there this need for competitiveness in writing. I see it everyday in my Advanced Writing class. I have three or four students who are writing as well as any senior in college. I have one who is writing as well as any sophomore, in high school! That gives you an idea of the range of abilities in that class. To say who the “best” writer is would be absurd. How can you say Ernest Hemingway is a ‘better’ writing than Shirley Jackson? It’s ridiculous.

If I had to use the term "best" to refer to my Advanced Writing class, one student comes to mind quickly. He has a solid “B.” I don’t know that he’ll ever get up to an “A” even. So what makes him the “best” writer so far? For one, his writing has grown the most. He has always had interesting ideas and topics. But he always wrote about them in a generic way. His examples were vague, and worse, often impersonal. But that changed the last two essays. One was a tone essay in which the students had to write about an event using two different tones. The other one was a persuasive essay. This student’s voice was clearer than ever. His personality was oozing all over the page. His writing was a pure joy to read and left me smiling. Yes, he had some punctuation and run-on errors, which led him to receive B’s on the papers, but they were the ‘best’ essays I’ve read this year.

My point in teaching writing has always been - we all have stories to tell. We are all interesting. Let’s learn from each other and, hopefully, learn something new about ourselves in the process. Screw who’s better than whom.

****

Here are two stories culled from the introduction to my thesis. They were the last editions to my thesis. I also think they are some of the best (uh, oh - there’s that word again) parts of my entire thesis. The first is the last time I saw my uncle Dick. He died two weeks ago. The other is a treasured memory about a great lesson my grandmother taught me. It would be a lesson that would come in handy a quarter century later years when I was looking to add some theory to back up the ideas in my thesis. Thanks, Granny.

I stood with my father and uncle, Dick Baril, at Myrtle’s grave. It was Memorial Day and rain threatened from the swollen clouds. A stiff breeze made a jacket necessary. I stuffed my fists deep into the front pockets. Dad and Dick were engaged in similar tactics to guard against the chill.

We examined the new plastic flowers we just set beside the headstone. Dad held last year’s faded flowers in his right hand. The new bright yellow, red, and white Kmart flowers seemed out of place. Mom always picked out the flowers and arranged them. We were visiting her grave next.

After making sure the replacements held their ground against the wind, we broke our silence. Dad said he was taking the old flowers back to the truck. I said that I’d be there in a bit and then reached into my jean jacket and snatched my journal. Dick turned his back to the breeze, plucked a Camel from the pack in his breast pocket while he fumbled a lighter out of his khakis. Then he cupped his hands and struck the lighter several times until I saw a red glow from inside his palms. He took a small drag and then the breeze snatched it.

I too turned my back to the wind and pried open my journal. I took the pen that had been crammed between the pages and scrolled, “Myrtle D. Baril (Demann) Feb 21 1905 - July 30 1988.” Then I peered at her husband’s name on the headstone and wrote, “Theophile J. Baril March 7, 1905 - May 28, 1971.” I was hoping to fill my journal with the key dates and places to fill in the gaps in my thesis. I needed to give the narratives a context.

My dad was great with the stories, but dates and places were not his strong suit. I was hoping to obtain them from Dick, who was up on his annual visit from the cities. This might be my last chance, for we feared Alzheimer’s was setting in. Dick had been a day late. Normally that wouldn’t have worried us, but Dick was well into his seventies. He had trouble finding his way home. Not only did he get lost on the way up, a trip that he made hundreds of times before, but he also began forgetting names and faces. The man who is my mom’s oldest brother, my godfather, and who even shares my birthday, forgot my name at Mom’s funeral last summer.

I tried drilling Dick about the dates when Granny first began teaching. I watched as he took another drag, noticing his hairy forearms ending in slender wrists. Forearms and wrists that were the same as the ones that held my journal and pen.

Dick took a shallow puff while I waited for an answer. He looked over at Dad who was now climbing into the cab. He talked about how Myrtle had to walk two miles to her first teaching job at a small country school.

I asked him about when Myrtle and Theophile - “Tuff,” Dick corrected me - had started dating. He told me they met at the Maple Lake Pavilion and spent Saturday nights dancing there in the summer. He never gave any dates. Finally, he pulled the Camel from the corner of his mouth, kicked up his brown Hush Puppy, and ground the cigarette out on the sole.

He exhaled and watched as the wind gave the final puff a new life. “Let’s get out of here,” he said turning his brown eyes on my mostly blank journal and poised Bic, “and I’ll tell you some stories.” He examined the polished black headstone and its dates one last time. Then he scanned all of the others lined around it. “These are just stones.”

I wrote those four words down and followed him back to the truck.

****

I sat securely in my grandmother’s lap, my knees tucked under my chin. Granny’s chin was tucked into my right shoulder while her spindly arms stretched around me. I peered at the National Geographic she held before me and hung on every word she read from the article and captions. In two days I would be visiting Manitoba’s Museum of Man and Nature. In the meantime, I had been talking nonstop about seeing the dinosaurs. To ease my suspense, Granny fished through her towering stack of National Geographics, which she had subscribed to for years (and she must have paid for well in advance since I continued to get them for a full two years after her death). Finally she located an issue devoted to a new T-Rex dig in South Dakota.

I remember little of the article. However, I recall stopping Granny at a double page spread of a stegosaurus that was recently completed and put on display at a museum (alas Granny informed me that it was not the Winnipeg Museum). I peered at the massive skeleton hulking in the room. As I looked closer, I saw a shaft of light streaming down from a high window. It fell across the dinosaur's back and rib cage, eventually landing on the paleontologists and museum director standing by a hind leg.

Granny told me how some scientists, called paleontologists, spent months unearthing the fossil inch by inch using toothbrush like instruments. I peered at her in disbelief. When I gazed back at the stegosaurus straddling the glossy pages, I began to see all of the different bones fused together to form the reconstructed monster. I even picked out several large iron rods running through the beast, helping hold the massive bones in place. The more I studied it, the more individual bones I saw as if it were a skeletal jigsaw puzzle.

“It must have taken them forever to dig this dinosaur up,” I said, thinking aloud about the men who looked tiny beside the stegosaurs.

“Oh dear, those bones never stood together in real life,” Granny replied.

It was the most startling thing she ever said. So startling in fact, that I still remember the words 25 years later.

Then Granny carefully explained how most bones over time just disintegrated. Only a fraction of dinosaur bones ended up as fossils. An even smaller fraction of those had been discovered. Sure scientists often found complete fossils of small prehistoric animals. They even found skeletons of early humans. But dinosaurs were huge creatures, she nodded her head toward the stegosaurs in the article below, so it was nearly impossible for an entire fossilized skeleton to be found, especially when most dinosaurs often met rather grizzly fates - devoured by a T-Rex, caught in a volcanic flow, swallowed by a tar pit. As a result, she explained, there was often little left, except for bits and pieces. A skull in South Dakota, a backbone in Colorado, a few ribs in Mexico.

“Then they’re liars,” I said feeling betrayed by those little men beneath their fake construction.

“Not at all,” Granny said. Not only were they working to piece together a creature that lived millions of years ago, she explained, but they were also dealing with hundreds - if not thousands - of individual bones at a time. Some bones were probably chewed or worn away from the elements. So it really was incredible that scientists were even able to accurately reconstruct any of the dinosaurs.

When I scoffed that it wouldn’t be that hard, Granny snapped that I was not one to criticize anyone when I could barely keep track of my Star Wars action figures’ weapons - and it was true, I was constantly digging through her couch cushions and crawling beneath it to look for Luke’s yellow light saber, which, if the truth be told, was actually lost, causing me to make due by using a yellow toothpick for the better part of a year - until I was able to trade away an extra storm trooper to Lance for his Luke Skywalker, whose legs had been blown apart during a Fourth of July reenactment of the Death Star explosion. Of course, I threw his Luke Skywalker away, but I saved his light saber for my Luke Skywalker.

Maybe she had a point after all.

“So how did they get this dinosaur together?” I asked.

“That’s what I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” Granny replied. She read a caption in the lower left hand corner. The stegosaurus was a collection of half a dozen different digs from around the world. But after years of work, it was now complete and ready for display.

“Well, that doesn’t seem very fair,” I finally said.

“It’s not a question of fairness,” Granny said suppressing a giggle. “It’s a question of science. They want to give the most accurate representation possible.”

I thought that over.

“Plus,” Granny added, “would you rather see this dinosaur in various pieces around the room - a skull or tooth here, a thigh or a horn there. Or would you rather stand next to this,” she added tapping the swollen joint of her index finger against the double page spread, “and feel what it would have been like to have a stegosaurus stride past you.”

I looked back at the stegosaurus for a long time, imagining the different stegosauruses and their various fates - combined now into one single beast and one final fate. Finally I let the bones merge into this stegosaurus again.

“Just think what would have happened had a T-Rex stumbled across this guy in a dark alley,” Granny said after awhile.

“Okay, a dark part of the jungle then,” she added with a chuckle, and she was off spinning a tale. With her words, the bones disappeared beneath blood, muscle, and flesh, beneath a coat of armored spikes beneath a scorching Jurassic sun.

Granny’s lesson on fossil reconstruction did come in handy that weekend at Manitoba’s Museum of Man and Nature. While they didn’t have any impressive T-Rex or Stegosaur skeletons, they did have one large skeleton of a prehistoric bear.

When our guide finally led us to the exhibit, I was able to cop Granny’s explanation, passing it off as my own. Our guide’s jaw nearly hit the floor when I explained to my fellow cub scouts how people often thought fossilized skeletons were actually one single dinosaur instead of bits and pieces of many collected from various digs around the country.

Most nodded, including our guide, as they accepted my theory. My chest swelled with this new found attention. Usually I was the kid in back on field trips, just trying to keep up. But Simon Geller, a friend of mine who usually had all of his theories readily accepted, piped up his dissension.

He further challenged my theory by stating he believed this bear had actually been discovered whole.

“Right, Simon,” I said. “How long ago did this thing die? Like a million years ago. And you’re telling me that the paleontologists were able to find every single little bone on this guy,” I said cocking my head toward the skeleton below us just as Granny had cocked her head down at the stegosaurus in the National Geographic.

“Yes,” Simon replied crossing his arms over his yellow tie and impressive collection of badges.

“Well, uh, actually,” the guide said once his jaw was back where it belonged, “you’re uh, quite right . . .” he said glancing at my name tag, “Kurt. This skeleton is comprised of bones taken from three separate digs in Manitoba and one in Alberta,” he added as he read the plaque on the display.

“Told you so,” I said to Simon, crossing my arms over my yellow tie and smirking so wildly that it made up for my two measly badges.