Being Brave in 1976

Overcoming My Self-Imposed Limits...for a few minutes

Tapfer sein  (Being Brave)

Figure 55:  Original newspaper story on Lonesome George

My tortured, artistic self finally found a home in English with my ninth-grade English teacher, Miss McKinnon. She was beautiful--everything I wanted to be but felt I wasn’t. She was a natural, petite, brunette beauty, and I spent hours on her assignments. I sat in the same classroom seat all year, and wished my time with her would continue forever.

She opened my heart to prose, and finally gave me a place to “live” in school. She did this with such an ease, and when she looked at me, I believe she may have seen herself at a younger age. I certainly would not have thought that while in her class; I just knew that her eyes smiled and revealed the way that I could begin finding and redefining “Mary.”

Miss McKinnon had us read excerpts from Walden[1] by Henry David Thoreau. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Oh yes, that was me. I was dancing to a different drummer. Well, I was dancing in my head and heart, and was working on revealing that to others.

Thoreau’s literary compadre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spoke words that I had felt at the sensorial level but had previously not known how to piece together in cerebral form. “It’s not the Destination. It's the journey.” I have come back to these words, this wisdom many times in the life I have led thus far. In that 9th-grade classroom, with Thoreau and Emerson by my side as written witnesses to the value of my existence, I knew to the core of me that I was home. Unfortunately, that home was with dead male Transcendentalist writers of the 19th century. This did me little or no good in mid-20th century, except make me feel more like an intruder in this life than a participant. Were there other Transcendentalists my age? I was sure there were not.

Miss McKinnon was the first person ever to tell me that I was a writer. I listened to her with great skepticism as I believed to the core of me that April (my older sister) was a much better writer than me. April could spell, apply grammar principles, and never make mistakes typing. My preconceived notions about the box of skills one needed to possess to “be” a writer constricted me for the better part of forty years.

I wrote poems which did not rhyme. Miss McKinnon called it “prose.” April had said that that style of writing was for the “lazy poet,” and that “talented writers took the time necessary to rhyme.” But I had an ally in Ms. McKinnon and e.e. cummings. Ha! So there, April!

One of our English class assignments was to find a news article in the Stars and Stripes, and write a literary story to go with it. We were to turn the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of it into something compelling, something lasting, something that inspired.

I poured over the pages of the fold-down-the-middle format of Stars and Stripes in search of something that moved me. The tales of the woes throughout the world--fighting, stand-offs, cold war--did not interest me. I was searching for the story that was poetic in its reach.

The article that I finally chose was about a Pica turtle on The Galapagos Islands named by his “discoverer,” Lonesome George. George was still alive, at the writing of the article, as the last member of his species. The sadness of his solitude spoke to my angsty teenage heart.

Of course I, along with the researchers, was anthropomorphizing George. I do recall wondering if the researchers were serving their own needs by shuttling George to their research center. They claimed that they were able to take care of him and help him by letting him live with other turtles, although none were of his exact species.

Maybe George was super-happy living on the Galapagos Islands and not in a research center--was that ever considered? What if, when the researchers found him, he was only on a stop-over from his actual home on some other remote island? Was that ever considered? I owe those expansive thoughts to Germany and to the travel we were doing while there. That, and Mom’s near constant thinking aloud during the travel.

When we only see things from our vantage point and experiential background, we potentially are viewing things incorrectly. This was my take on Lonesome George. I wrote that if he was “lonely” before the humans arrived, he was lonelier when they moved him with the misguided notion of “helping” him. I was taking a real chance with inserting my opinions. I was veering off the path of the expected, of the Lemming mentality.

I felt so vulnerable in a product that would not be what others expected me to do. I wrote another, “Stay Within the Lines” version, containing the requisite “Poor George, All Alone in This World” country-song vibe, and then promptly threw it out. It sickened me to conform in my writing. I turned in my original assignment written in my Truth Voice.

A few days later, prior to receiving our papers back with grades attached, Miss McKinnon decided that we should each read them out loud to the class. What! If I had known that ahead of time, I would have turned in the “Stay Within the Lines” version. Now my classmates were going to witness my honest voice, and I had no protection against their potential laughter and derision.

“Who wants to go first?” was Miss McKinnon’s opening question. In a moment of unbridled fear mixed with resolution, I quickly answered with, “I will.” An audible and visible sigh of relief wove throughout the classroom as all the others knew they could wait to read theirs.

She passed the paper back to me and there at the top of the page, in large red print was an A+ with the word in bold writing, “Stunning.” I was dumbfounded but still sure that my classmates would not understand or accept my literary take on this depressed reptile.

I stood to the side of my chair, held my paper up high so as to cover my face, still allowing me to see it to read but to stay hidden. “Mary, lower your paper a bit so that you can still see it but we can see you.” Great; she knew what I was doing and was undoing my protective mantle. Or perhaps she knew that by my writing, I had already dropped my layer of protection and was ready to begin being myself in front of others.

Whatever the reason, or revelation, I began, “My article was on George, a Pica turtle, originally discovered by scientists visiting the Galapagos Islands. He has been nicknamed Lonesome George because he is believed to be the last of his species on the planet.”

A collective sigh of “Aww” settled over the class. I continued, “It would be easy to feel sorry for him, but the bigger sorrow is that people decided his fate by removing him from the island and   putting their human narrative on him. My story is told from the vantage point of George.”

When I finished reading my one-page assignment, the room was silent. Oh shit. Now comes the laughter, the giggling, the whispers of “What a weirdo.” I searched for the one face that I knew would meet my eyes and reassure me that my voice, my writing, was important. Miss McKinnon’s eyes were holding tears at the cusp, and that made me gulp the swallow of thanks and also of “Please don’t let me cry in front of my classmates.” Then they, the very people I had assumed would try to put me back into what I was sure were their boxes of beliefs, erupted in unified applause.

I wish, from that day forth, I had banished my internal censor, and written and spoken the questions and ponderings rolling around in my mind and heart, but I didn’t. The Censor lived largely in me and was not freed for good that day--only set aside--as it would be from time to time.

That assignment was long thrown away, but I saw as an adult that someone wrote a children’s book about George some years later. The only difference between me and that author was that they believed in themselves enough to write the book. How was I going to find this courage in myself? It was right there…when I put The Censor aside, I had my courage. But I did not know that to the core of me yet. I only saw my 9th-grade Lonesome George assignment and the reaction of my classmates as “Oh, I guess I did a good job on that homework.” It was so, so much more than that. It was a pivotal moment for me that I chose to shelve until I could not put off myself and my worth anymore.

Spiral forward to 2022…Tell me of your moment, when you couldn’t put “yourself” off any longer. That moment when you were “you”…tell me your story below, please.

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