New Intro

Here is that new intro I came up with.

It has taken me a decade, but I have perfected my Sunday night ritual: fill a deep ceramic coffee mug with steaming light roast coffee, snug my ipod headphones into each ear, cradle my gold Cross pen with blue ink (red ink is so 1950’s) in my right hand, and select an essay from the stack of College Composition papers on our kitchen table. Then I get lost in the writing.

For the next few hours, I have the best job in the world, and I am not even at work. Yes, my pen is almost non-stop. “Tell me more” it scrawls in the right margin of one paper while it circles an entire paragraph and responds, “Now you’re showing! Do more of this!” On another essay it weaves over the first paragraph, “Don’t tell us what you are going to write about, show us!” and later in another paper, “This would be more vivid if you used dialogue.” Of course, it often swoops in and notes the wrong use of “there” or spies a missing comma and advises, “End an introductory adverb clause with a comma.” But the reward is getting lost in the writing.

In one essay a student recounts the final bitter words she said to her mother as she left for grade school, only to have her father pluck her out of class later that day and rush her to the hospital, where her mother will die that night in surgery. Another essay takes me onto the golf course in the hazy heat of mid August, where the writer’s rivalry with his older brother comes down to one final putt. Despite his escalating heart rate and his brother’s barrage of insults, the writer drains the putt and defeats his brother for the first time . . . in anything.

By now my coffee is cold and my ipod playlist is repeating, but I’m lost in the work. I am giggling as a student recounts how, as a child, she was fond of discovering new moles and freckles, which her mother dubbed “Angel Kisses.” One day she proudly thrust her head in her older sister’s face, displaying the newest peck from heaven. “That’s not an Angel Kiss, you freak,” her older sister declared (and – after having two older siblings - I can see the devilish grin slice across her sister’s face). “You’re growing a third ear!” She believed her sibling, bragging about it at daycare, even believing she can detect conversations from the house next door. After inspecting the mole in the bathroom mirror on a nightly basis, her mother caught her and had to break the news that it was – alas -- just a mole. In another essay, I am hurrying through downtown Minneapolis, dodging traffic, pedestrians, and vendors, accompanying a student and his father on their trip of a lifetime to see U2 at the Target Center. Their seats are so close, the student can see Bono’s stubble. After that paper, I spit out a partial mouthful of icy coffee and scroll through my ipod in search of The Joshua Tree.