I am excited because starting in April I am taking a journalism class taught by someone whose writing I really like and respect. I've been lucky enough to get some good writing training in my life. I blame it all on Fred Wagner, an English Professor at Hamilton who did not teach me to write. He was, however, a wonderful teacher who did not teach me to write. What he did do was tell me that I couldn't take his 20th Century Literature class until I learned to write, and in an unprecedented and singular moment in my (I was going to say 'checkered' here, but that implies more high points than there actually were) college career, I was genuinely motivated because I really wanted to take the class. So I had to take an expository writing class with a guy who was neither a wonderful teacher nor an even a passably nice person. But a theme of my life seems to be that even seemingly wasted time is not actually wasted. So in the same way I kind of blew off my college psychology classes and yet ended up working in two different but both psychology-based fields, I seem to have begun learning to write in that class.
It was not that much later when I wrote the series of letters I mentioned a couple of days ago. I'll quote a part of it that I actually remember clearly.
We had just just crossed the Alabama state line looking for a campground. Steve and I went into this store and asked the owner. He said that there was a roadside park up the road about 500 yards and that we could camp there. I said, "Doesn't anybody care if you camp in a roadside park?" "Down here," he said, "nobody does nothin' about nothin'."
Unfortunately, the park was full of garbage do we had to move on. We drove through Mobile, catching a tremendous lightning show. I'd never seen such cloud to cloud lightning before. After about 15 minutes of spectacular displays, a huge starburst of electricity shot in all directions and suddenly the lights all went out. Intense.
I can still see that lighting flash and the city going dark.
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