All big brown eyes and whirling energy, Gio popped up in front of me and pulled down his bottom lip.
“I just lost my two front teeth this morning!”
I didn’t know this child. I had come to this photography exhibit alone, and Gio was there with several family members who were already aware of his tooth situation. But this was an important matter, and I love a young storyteller.
“Wow! Both of them? Just this morning?”
“Yep. And I got two dollars.”
“That’s amazing. Did it hurt when they came out? I always hated that part.”
“A little,” he said, momentarily glum.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
We held a moment of silence for the departed teeth, and then we turned in unison to face a photo of a boy holding a rooster, a terrible scowl below his spiky blond head (the boy’s, not the rooster’s).
“He’s really mad,” the 7-year-old art aficionado said, tilting his head at the boy.
“He really seems so,” I agreed, tilting mine.
“What do you think he’s mad about?” I wondered.
“I think he’s mad because he has to hold that chicken.”
Gio executed several flawless jumping jacks as we discussed our favorite pizza toppings (peppers, yes; mushrooms, absolutely not) and how he planned to own a restaurant one day. He also thought he could elevate the tooth fairy’s game, and he already had a prospectus laid out in his head. Small diamonds, for example, would be given for each lost tooth.
He turned his attention to me. “So, what, um, what are you going to be when you grow up?”
I noted his wording: What are you going to be, not what do you want to be. I gave this serious thought because it is perhaps the most serious question on a grade-schooler’s mind.
Was there something else I’d rather be? Someone else I’d rather be? I wondered if I should tell Gio about the four pandemic months I spent studying to be a counselor before I realized the depth of my hatred for creating Google Slides and writing research papers in APA format. How I wanted to hug my old Associated Press Stylebook by the end of the semester.
I settled for the truth.
“I’m going to be a writer when I grow up,” I said with shaky confidence.
“Cool,” he said, offering a validating fist bump.
I answered his question with lingering uncertainty even though I’m in my 44th year of writing as a human on this planet—I was somewhere around Gio’s age now when I wrote my first poem, about winter. I answered his question without full confidence because although I will always be a person who writes, calling myself a writer feels like a privilege that I get up every day to try and earn all over again, as though I won’t become a writer until the powers-that-be FedEx me a velvet blazer embroidered with a golden crest on its breast pocket, indicating that I have tenure and can come to all the secret parties.
But if there is a saint holding a ledger at the gate to some writerly Good Place, let the record show that last night, I was a poet … though not an angelic one. Last week, a short-story writer. Last month, a humorist. Next week, a memoirist. Today … an essayist, I guess.
Tomorrow, I’ll also be a writer of thank-you notes. A maker of store lists. A keeper of calendar appointments. A jotter of notes. A describer of symptoms. An interpreter of neurodivergence. A teller of tales tall and small to get a teenager out of bed and off to school, to get a dog to stop yelling at the deer in the backyard, to get myself to believe that I can keep all the plates spinning: mother, wife, friend, former daughter … person who writes.
Maybe the velvet blazer never arrives, but both of the paragraphs above make me, at the very least, a person of stories. A person with stories. And a person who loves to hear the stories of others.
Like Marta Singh, who told me in our interview, “Very few of us have a sense that our lives have something in them worth telling … but the threads out of which fairy tales are woven are the threads out of which our lives are woven.”
Like Vivian Keh, whose work in her orchard mirrors the work of rebuilding after loss and heartbreak. “Some trees want to be more vigorous than the others,” she said. “Sometimes you’ve got to prune them back. You’ve got to give the other ones a chance to grow.”
Like Bill Bamberger, whose description of the contemporary boy’s struggle to become a new version of “good” is not unlike the struggle we all face when we turn a new corner, reach an age of poignancy, or pass a milestone that is unfamiliar. “It’s harder,” he said, “… to know how to be.”
Like you, and what you would tell me today if I asked you this question: “What is the richest, deepest tale you know—from your life?”
As I worked on my memoir, I spent a great deal of time interviewing photographs from my life and listening to playlists from the era I was writing about. It was helpful for understanding my journey, but less useful for understanding the path of the woman who had disowned me. I knew very little about who my mother was in her adolescence and young adulthood beyond a few sour memories she repeated as though they were her breath and badge. Her youth was a wall she was always pushing up against, never tearing down, never climbing over.
I needed to know how we were different. I needed to know how we were similar. I needed to know her story in order to understand mine. So I interviewed the only photograph of her that exists before she became an adult. What I discovered will appear here next week in a new Intrepid Post, “Discarded.”
If Gio had known the story behind that spiky-haired kid in the photograph—that the photo was taken at a cockfighting event—I wonder if he would have seen it differently. I wonder if he would see a boy who I try very hard to see in it now, one who isn’t clutching a rooster angrily but is, I hope, trying to rescue it from its fate. Perhaps the look on his face isn’t about cruelty but the fierce protection of the vulnerable. Maybe both of these boys will figure out the path to what “being good” means.
But I know from our short interaction that Gio understands the power of telling and asking, of taking and giving.
Before we parted ways at the museum, he rolled up his red sleeve and showed me his bicep. “I’m going to be very strong one day, too. You have to exercise a whole lot, like hours every day, but then you get really big muscles.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“If you get really strong,” he said, squatting low and making a generous basket with his arms, “you can pick up the whole world. That’s what I’m going to do.” ♣
NEXT WEDNESDAY: “Discarded,” an Intrepid Post about goodness, mattering, and the threatening seas of family history.
IN TWO WEEKS: The first in a new triptych of interviews on redefining empowerment.