Five

On a winding trail through the San Gabriels, we scaled the frosted mountainside together. You clung with embryonic persistence as my toes found purchase in snowbanks peeling back from crumbling stone. It was February then, or maybe March, and you were still just a hope I dared not count as one among us. Still, we wound our thread together through those unmarked canyons, managing to find our way both in and back out despite our shared inability to identify a true north. When gravity pushed back against my smug confidence, she kicked my heel out from under me and tumbled me down a frozen waterfall, my backside raking over the jagged teeth of the unyielding creek below. My skin gasped through torn trousers at the slap of iced air and my coccyx howled in protest. But not you. You just rolled on over and commanded me, "Up, Mommy! Do it again!"

We walked through the spring months over eroding summits, through ponderosa and coulter pine forests. We disentangled ourselves from the manzanita's ruby clutches and breathed deep the clouds of sandstone dust. Rattlesnakes coiled at the trail's edge. Coyotes lurked in packs down below, lapping at whatever ribbon of creek remained as the bottomless thirst of June and then July pressed in. You grew hot and restless, as keen to hear the insane yelps of those wild dogs as any among us. You were not yet a name, but you were a definite you.

Every one of those sweltering August days, California's high desert sky was an uninterrupted expanse of blue. Where shade was insufficient, we took shelter in water. The camp pool was our sanctuary during the noon lunch hour. In the dining hall nearby, squeals of damp, red-faced children eating corn dogs and tater tots tumbled down over us as we cut through the rectangle of blue. Immersion, extension, buoyancy, breath.

We climbed and swam together until the doctor demanded we stop. We stretched ourselves out through September, cutting a trench in the camp perimeter with our shared weight, with our endless steps. Two weeks before your ETA, the doc announced you were on your way. You had sent me no signal; you had never even knocked. You just began shouldering open the stable door, compelled, perhaps, by the bright promise on this side of the threshold.

In that hospital in Apple Valley, though, you stalled right at the starting gate. One never knows what kind of kid is going to come slipping out to life. Maybe you were to be a hesitant type after all. Would you be one who lingers in doorways? One who keeps his feet planted firm on flat ground while the others bound up and over the uncertain horizon?

The doctor told me to walk. I walked. The tiny hospital courtyard became a stadium track, a mountain pass, the whole of the Pacific Rim trail. For nine months, we had marched. Now we walked another 90 years, another 900 miles, a marathon to coax you to life.

When the doc finally forced you free and you landed in your daddy's waiting hands, we knew it was not reluctance that had held you back. Arm up, fist raised, you had been trying to punch your way right through to the light of day. My boy has been a warrior from the start. You defy rules. You blaze your own trail. This, even when your stubbornness hamstrings your own determination to be the first across the finish line. You came over to our side fully formed, a tiny hot-wired motor already primed for speed.

"Alive 'til five," the grandmothers say. This alone is a lofty goal for the mama of a boy like you. It stuns me you have survived, let alone thrived. Yet here you are, launching yourself around the next lap. Your pace is not faltering, and your stride only grows more sure.

Happy birthday, baby. The terrain ahead may be rough, but I look forward to crossing every inch of it with you.

Read This Book

This graphics-rich collaboration by three Gen X writers is like Jon Stewart’s America for the Y.A. set. But unlike Stewart’s readers — at least theoretically — the intended audience for “Americapedia” still needs to learn the basics of the American Revolution (“America Unfriends Great Britain”). So while the book holds no shortage of attitude and satire, it also imparts an impressive array of historical substance and even a degree of earnestness and patriotism, complete with an appendix on civic action for teenagers.      

 - Pamela Paul's review of Americapedia in The New York Times Sunday Book Review

The 6^th graders owned the back of the class. We were the spillover kids, one handful too many to squeeze into overcrowded rooms up the hall. To accommodate our odd numbers, the school shoved a bank of desks together in the 5th grade pod. The poor instructor had probably won Teacher of the Year the previous spring. Her prize for her excellence was a group of rowdy pre-adolescents gumming up the works in her class.

Because we were older and fewer, our teacher's main concern was keeping us out of trouble so she could teach her little ducklings. If she left us to our own devices for more than ten minutes, she would have a Lord of the Flies situation on her hands. Andy and I, seated across the island of desks from each other, did not help the situation. We irritated the spit out of each other. He razzed me until I was close to tears, probably because I was a hyper-sensitive dope and what's more fun than getting a rise out of a weepy pre-teen girl? I undoubtedly fumbled around for come-backs, and maybe even managed to bruise a remote corner of his ego with my screechy insults.

Our teacher tried to keep the lot of us out of trouble by throwing heaps of busy-work our way. Those wide-ruled, black-and-white composition books were one tool for classroom management. The assignments were the usual elementary school pablum – “What I Did on my Summer Vacation.” To kill time, we read our entries out loud to each other.

Bo-o-oring.

Until Andy got going. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who loved his stories most of all. Most days, I would have given anything to live on a different planet than that boy. But Andy's stories. . . well. They made me want to come back for a visit.

Memory fuzzes out after a couple of decades. The narratives might have involved the delicious comeuppance of the class bully. Maybe interplanetary hijinks between the cafeteria lady and the gym teacher. Who knows? All I remember were that his pieces were short, dangerous (the teacher was covering fractions with the toddlers up front, after all), and hysterically funny to an audience of 11-year-olds. Andy only needed a No. 2 pencil and half a blank page to make his peers titter and squirm in delight.

One brief moment in one otherwise indistinct day still blazes in my recollection. Snickering with my classmates as Andy read one of his naughty tales, a Mack truck plowed into me. I stopped laughing and reeled with a sudden realization. Andy had written it. This kid had taken a pencil and just written down a story from inside his own brain!

You would think this would not be such a revelation to a child raised by bibliophiles. My house had no television in it until I was ten years old. We owned records and art supplies and a big back yard, but what we collected in the greatest abundance was books. Mountains of books. Teetering, sagging shelves full of books.  From my earliest years, I had a voracious appetite for all those words. My father did not sit at the edge of my sister’s and my bunk bed and read Dr. Seuss. No, he read us Mark Twain. Charles Dickens. Victor Hugo. Seriously.  My childhood villain was Javert, not Boss Hogg.

Somehow, I had missed a key point in all that reading. A person, a real human person, had cut every one of my beloved characters from the cloth of imagination. Someone had written those stories.

Someone like Andy.

Why not someone like me?

The glare of this one single flashpoint from over 25 years ago still makes me blink. That day, I started writing. Really writing. Not just writing the dreary assignments doled out by an overworked and underpaid teacher, but building narratives. Playing with language. Practicing the craft.

I was eons behind Andy in both native talent and training hours logged. But I began then, at the unruly back end of a crowded classroom. I began to write.

As for Andy? He never stopped.

Next week, you can order Andisheh Nouraee's first book. Americapedia: Taking the Dumb out of Freedom, is launching on July 19th. That clever kid is one of three authors of this smart, satire-rich take on American politics and history. In the decades since he left those composition books behind, the fella’s wit has only grown sharper and his writing more polished.

And he still knows how to make every grinning idiot in the room squirm.

Read this book. Remember someone very real wrote it. Raise your glass – and your pencil – to that deserving guy.  Then go out and buy a few copies for your friends. Buy some for your enemies, too. You never know when you might learn something from them.