Life-Defining Moments....Memory 1

Lately, I've been putting the past 26 years and 9 months of my life under a personal microscope, trying to learn more about myself. I figure, nobody can teach me who I am, it's all on me. And lord knows there's tons of layers left on M.B. to unravel. Just this past year I found myself questioning a few things about yours truly that I had always taken to be constants, not momentaries. This'll be one hell of a journey, I know, but for now, I've decided to single out specific moments in my life, points in time when a major shift in my existence kicked into gear.

These won't be in any sort of chronological order, they'll just be hitting me randomly and I'll jot them down as they come to mind. This blog acts as a journal of sorts for me...a place where I can put down thoughts and feelings and excitements that would otherwise have no home. And, in the process, those who give a shit can learn a bit more about M.B., if they so choose.

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One memory that has always rang bells in my mind dates back to 4th grade, when I was a quiet, timid, insecure, straight-A student at St. Catharine's Interparochial School in preppy-ass Glen Rock, New Jersey. Tight-panted uniforms that pulled up past the ankles while seated, full-on flood pants. Sweater vests, button up shirts and ties of the clip-on variety.

I rolled with a pack of kids really nothing like me, save for an interest in sports and a strong affinity for Michael Jordan. If not for sports, particularly basketball at that time, I'd have most likely ended up a hermit who later became a total bookworm in his later educational days and went on to make a shitload more money than I do now. But I'd be miserable at heart, so what I make now is better than that regardless. But anyway....

We had this nasty, bitch of a librarian named Mrs. Mueller, a real witch who seemed to thrive on torturing young kids with boring literature and zero kindness. Well, actually, she was somewhat kind to me, being that I was all grade-As and all obedience. The rest of the boys in my class were true sons-of-bitches, the type of pains who'd do shit such as unraveling paper clips and throwing around the library as Mrs. Mueller would read us stories such as The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

On one particular day in library class, my fellow male classmates must have littered the carpet with over 30 straightened paper clips, and Mueller had a fucking cown. Fuck that, she had an entire cattle. Rather than pulling out a machete and slicing every boy's head off, then spiking each on top of stacked paper clips as some sort of faux Pagan ritual, she made all of us (yes, me too, being that I'm of a the boy gender, she didn't want to exclude me from the shame, now, even though I didn't touch one fucking paper clip) sit in the back of the library while the chicks in my class kept on nodding off to that Narnia bullshit. We weren't told to simply sit in silence, however; no, we had a writing assignment: scribe a narrative essay, with only the working title of 'A Day In the Life of a Paper Clip' as our starting point. From there, we had creative control over the plot, conflict, characters, etc.

Me being a lover of fantasy and an avid watcher of film, even back at that ripe age (about 10, 11, or so, I guess), I saw this as a prime opportunity to let the imagination run amok. So when the 15-minute time period was up, Mrs. Mueller decided to further the public humiliation and read each of our essays aloud to the entire class. Masochist old hag that she was.

The first couple were, at the most, 30 words long. "I am a paper clip. I was made in a paper clip factory. I held papers together in Saint Catharine's. The end." Some shit like that, real pathetic attempts at storytelling. After about six or seven awful stabs at this from my peers, it came to read mine aloud.

"A Day in the Life of a Paper Clip, by Matthew Barone," began Mrs. Mueller. Of course, I was the only goodie-goodie who actually titled my piece as such. Then, Mueller's face dropped a bit, as she realized that I had written three pages', front side and back side of each, worth of tale. I'd named the protagonist paper clip (Billy, I believe), thought up a whole central conflict (he was separated from his paper clips parents at the factory on one sad, fateful day, causing parallel plotlines of his efforts of reuniting with his 'rents and the 'rents' episodes of depression and despair).

There was adventure (Billy mad dash through the library as a vacuum cleaner sucked everything in its path up, nearly inhaling our brave Billy Boy on at least four occasions); suspense (Billy is picked up by one bastard student, who slowly begins unraveling him as Billy squeals in agony, only to be saved as the librarian reprimands the student/assailant); and even hints of romance (Billy develops a crush on a female paper clip, one colored pink, though I forget her name at the moment).

Keep in mind, I was in 4th grade.

By story's end, Mrs. Mueller literally walked over to me and shook my hand, and called in our homeroom teacher to share the tale of Matthew Barone's amazing paper clip epic. Perhaps she was most intrigued by the fact that my story had a dark, unhappy ending (just as Billy's parents are taken out of the box-of-clips in the library, they see poor Billy being unraveled as his one end extends to them in some sort of reach-out for help), and me being a wee lad, she couldn't imagine such tragedy being executed. Or maybe she was just creeped out by that point.

But looking back on that day, I truly feel like that was the genesis of my wanting to become a storyteller. A writer. The response "A Day in the Life of a Paper Clip" was met with from those faculty members and a select few peers was a bit surprising, and it felt damn good. After that, I went on to write several more stories in my spare time, at home in notepads and bound journal-meant books. Those will all be written about here in the near future.

So from now on, when you routinely use a paper clip to hold some pages together, take a second to stop and look at it, and listen closely. It could very well be just like poor Billy, crying for compassion and freedom.