Early Childhood

Early childhood was, obviously, a time of beginnings. I was born into a family of fairly smart people (my mother, an executive, and my dad, a computer engineer, were both successful) who had come from families who had mixed backgrounds, but were all bright people. My mother's parents were self-made upper-class socialites, with my grandfather a successful doctor, and my grandmother a wonderful homemaker and legendary mom. My father's parents were from downtown Cleveland, with my grandmother working as an organic chemist in a male-dominated profession, and my grandfather working two (sometimes three) jobs in machine shops and engineering firms. He was a clever man, regarded in high esttem amongst his peers, and impressed upon his children (my father included) the need for an education to succeed in life, to make it out of the slums of Cleveland. This natural intelligence and impression on education were impressed upon me as a child, with my grandparents encouraged in both reading and writing. I began to learn the basics of literacy, as the timeline below will indicate.

-Clarence Day

(from thinkexist.com)

The Links on the left are those events that marked personal milestones in my life, while the column on the right are those events and inventions in the world that eventually had an effect on my literary life.

• I was born
• I learned how to talk
• I learned how to read
• I learned how to write
• My parents divorced
• I began going to school
• I moved to Saline

• The modern Internet is invented

Obviously, I wasn't born a Hemingway or a Steinbeck, and I am still nowhere close to that caliber, but without this important event I couldn't even begin my literate life.

Often many people forget one of the important precursors to literate life: talking. Before people began expressing ideas with pen and paper, they were spread through words and oral communication. Talking helped me begin to think so I could express my ideas to others, form coherent trains of thought, and give me a outlet to express my curiosity at the marvels of the world I lived in. However, at this stage, everyone else often had trouble understand my "coherent" thoughts. My mother still laughs at how, one day, I wanted some "Wa-know-wawa." Puzzled, she began to pull various "Wa-know-wawas" out of the pantry, amid my growing frustration at her incompetence. Finally, after emptying her cabinets, she pulled out a can of raisins. I promptly shouted my delight as she gave me some of the "Wa-know-wawa." Apparently, I remembered eating raisins in a "Gran-o-la" bar, and expressed my desire for the former through the latter. Obviously, my talking skills still needed some work.

This is. quite simply, the most important part of my literate life. I began reading around the age of 2, in a rather unusual fashion. My family received the newspaper daily, and my parents would often leave it lying out. I would lie for hours on the floor, fascinated by the letters and words that covered paper as big as I was. Even more fascinating were the pictures. Oh, the pictures! I would flip, entranced, staring at the pictures of people, places, and buildings from all over the world. We sometimes played a game where I would make up a story to go along with the picture, to explain why there was a fire, or how come those people were there, or what that house meant. Oddly enough, my fictitious stories sometimes came fairly close to the real newspaper stories. Eventually, I began to pick up words, often by asking who or what was in the pictures. Soon, I was reading simple newspaper articles by myself. My parents came to encourage this challenge, often pointing out longer and harder stories for me to tackle. They also served as my censors, making sure they only left out the pages with "appropriate" articles in them. I still surprised them, though. For example, I went through a 3 month period where I was deathly afraid of going under freeway signs, after I read an article about one falling off an overpass onto a car.

Reading became important to me as I progressed through my early childhood. An avid fiction reader, I read Goosebumps by R.L. Stein and The Boxcar Children religiously. Besides the newspaper, I began to read children's books about the world, helping me to learn and broaden my horizons. My reading habit can in handy as I started to attend school

Well, I can't be very literate if I don't know how to write, can I? I learned how to write soon after I began to read, but it was not until I began going to school that my writing skill began to develop. I still have sheets of that grey butcher-block paper with the blue lines on it, covered with "Ann is mad. Ann was late fur the buss." in childlike scrawl. My writing skills, hopefully, have developed beyond that point, but all things must start somewhere, right?

In 1989, my parents filed for divorce. One would wonder what a divorce would have anything to with a literacy biography, but it did have an effect on my later writing. As a began to grow older, my feelings and other various parts of the divorce gave me a subject to free write about, or to make descriptions of similar expieriences much more easy to understand and much more powerfully descriptive. This idea of using personal experience as a reinforcement to my other writing was a real breakthrough for me at the time.

Obviously, I would not be able to write or read well without formal education on the subject. I began school in 1992, and Ypsilanti Elementary School in Yspsilanti, Michigan. I remember the first real essay (one paragraph) I wrote was about how me and my friends had found a waterhole in the back of the playground, and there was a crayfish living in it. We proceeded to name him "Bob" and, being young boys, tried to catch him. My efforts to liberate Bob from his watery home was a sharp pinch on the thumb, which actually caused me to be sent to the school nurse for the first (but definitely not last) time.

In 2nd grade, I moved to Saline, Michigan. Ypsilanti, where I had lived, was slowly degrading into a slummy suburb of Detroit, and their educational system began to reflect this decline. Saline Area Schools eventually gave me a quality education, and I learned almost everything I know about reading and writing from them. The experience of packing everything up, leaving my friends, going to a whole new place, and having to adjust to a new world also provided another piece of life for me to write about.

This had (has) a very profound effect on my literary life. Although we were not blessed with a computer that I could use during this phase of my life, the internet and personal computer are now almost the only source for literary output for me.

http://saline.lib.mi.us/sbfg/saline/

http://www.personal.psu.edu

http://www.childrensdesigns.com