Memory, all alone in the moonlight...

While I was in Arizona last week I went through a box of old school papers my mom had saved. I only took pictures of about 5 percent of the material, there were so many papers!

Here's a picture of my kindergarten class. 

After reading some of the work from that year, I'm pretty sure I was in a bilingual class. I wish some of the Spanish had stuck!

Aleks thinks I should have been seeing a therapist after seeing this artwork. I don't know, it think it's pretty normal for a elementary school kid. Since my name is in cursive, I'm guessing it's from sometime between 3rd or 5th grade.

Also, roller skating. Apparently it was a big deal as it was a reoccurring theme throughout my writings from that age.

I found a journal I had written from when I was nine. It's pure gold people.

"But cats are cute so I don't know." Hey, I've always been open to learning and exploring different opinions!

"I'm not pretty, does that mean I have to be pretty?" Here we can trace the beginning of my feministic slant.

I found this piece about the '89 earthquake. I was eight at the time.

I found this poem and it's not clear as to whether it's something I wrote. I feel like if I did, I was a child prodigy and should have been published.

Or maybe the assignment was to copy it from a book and I just forgot to cite the author. In which case, I was a childhood plagiarist.

Either way, it's a great poem.

This is from a short fictional story I wrote when I was in middle school. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I found myself impressed at the detail and writing craft. It's a good story. I might loan you a complete copy if you ask nicely.

I'm pretty sure this was printed on a dot matrix printer.

It was surprisingly exciting and invigorating to read through all my old papers. It wasn't painful at all. I thought that I might be sucked into a vortex of self loathing, but really, I was an interesting kid. I'm sure my teachers told stories about some of the things I wrote.

One of my high school students told me about a podcast called "Grownup Read Things They Wrote as Kids." I have yet to check it out, but apparently I'm not the only one who thinks their kid version was pretty funny.