Paperback (Short Story)

Short Story Tuesdays

My earliest memory stems from preschool, a teacher, whose face I don’t even remember, using a safety pin to attach a folded piece of paper to the back of my shirt before placing me on a school bus to go home. Being the skinny kid I was, the message intended for my mother was like a billboard covering half my torso. I don’t know how they do it nowadays, probably via text message, but this was how they used to get information to the parents of the little ones.

Out of all my memories, why was this one imprinted the deepest? Some people believe life is about coming full circle.

I’ve spent the past few days preparing for the next chapter in my life. Actually, it’s been years in the making when I really think about it. Maybe as far back as that first memory. Part of being a child is being exposed to a great deal of storytelling, for such a tool has proven to work well with the learning process. For most kids it ends up being a building block, to serve alongside other fundamentals of development. But for some, like myself, a special kinship is formed, with story becoming the most important part of one’s foundation. For these few, paperbacks take precedence over toys, hardbacks being the evening entertainment while parents and siblings watch television in the background.

As you can imagine, book reports were my sheer joy, my recess, my show-and-tell. In middle school, targets were set on getting published in the school paper, and by high school my focus was on more widely circulated publications, like magazines and such.