During the testing session I account for all the materials: pencils, answer sheets, scrap paper, and test booklets. There’s no honor among thieves, so it’s best to be prepared. One rather surly prisoner at the back of the classroom, sporting dark shades, crumples up his scrap paper and slides it into his pocket. He has a relatively easy essay question:
What is one important goal you would like to achieve in the next few years? Identify that goal. Explain how you plan to achieve it. Use your personal observations, experience, and knowledge to support your essay.
His pencil remains horizontal; the clock ticks away, time runs out.
I collect everything; well, almost everything. “I need that green scrap of paper,” I say. Without direct eye contact, I’m unsure whether he’ll cooperate. “It’s in your pocket,” I add. He throws it on the desk, and then exits.
His essay sheet remains blank, not one word. I uncrumple the scrap paper and discover the following:
It’s a perfectly normal goal to have. Unfortunately he’s light years away from achieving it, and he definitely doesn’t have a plan. I pull his file:
Armed robbery, 3-20 years. Date of offense: 12/31/07. Early release date: 12/30/10. Maximum discharge date: 12/30/27.
Below that: Larceny over $100. Date of sentence: 4/7/98. DISCHARGED WITHOUT IMPROVEMENT.
Some guys never learn. Based on his record, there’s no way he’ll be released early. And why should he? He's dangerous. It doesn’t matter whether he wants to be with his kids. What about the 10-year old son of fallen Detroit Police Officer Brian Huff? Because of an ex-felon’s violent history, his decision to pull the trigger, this boy will never see his father again, and his mother will wake-up on Mother’s Day knowing she’ll need to move forward, knowing she’ll have to set some goals as to how to raise her child without a husband.
6 comments:
Seriously, I think I'd like to try the proferred essay.
What is one important goal you would like to achieve in the next few years? Identify that goal. Explain how you plan to achieve it. Use your personal observations, experience, and knowledge to support your essay.
Thirty-seven years ago I asked myself the same question.
the goal was to have WRITER finally emblazoned on my Tee shirt.
How to achieve the goal?
I dropped everything an put all my eggs into one basket: The novel.
Oh-oh. Survival became more important than the novel. Gotta eat, gotta pay rent; gotta support the kids.
Years of hand-to-mouth existence, depressing the wife and kids. But work on the manuscript at night! I finally finished the novel and gave it to a publisher who was a halway friend.
He was kind. "I'm not going to send your book back because it has had a couple of good reviews...But seriously as a successful journalist I thought you could do better."
A year goes by and I finally ask for the script back.
I sent the book to McClelland and Stewart, Canada's biggest publisher, and get a form rejection. "The selection process itself must be adhered to."
Omigod. Rumpelstiltskin!
My quest may have been the quest of a fool.
Finally, my wife took pity on me and offered me much of her income to try and try again with the book.
I finally gave up and took up work as a newspaper columnist. This didn't pay enough, so I finally had to teach.
Years and years went by, I was getting long in the tooth and was plastering my walls with rejection letters. While somehow reaching fame in my home town of Newmarket as a columnist, I nevertheless knew the real score. The tabula non rasa of a writer was to produce and publish a novel. I had worked at the Toroonto Star. Everybody at the Star knew that. Journalism was chores, hack work; fiction was different from journalism... and there were so many journalists with novels in the attic at the Star-- and these folks too were getting their rejections, Star writers or not. In book publishing, among hardcover authors, anybody who did journalism was a "sellout" and a cypher.
And all the fuzzy- eared real "creative types" would kick you out.
Many, many years go by, and still no book publishing. Awards, kudos, department headships...ah but that doesn' count. The novel, that's the thing...Otherwise a phoney.
Well, here I am, thirty-eight years later, broke, half-mad. Faiure.
But lokee here in the mail.
"Ivan, I think I made a mistake in rejecting your novel, The Hat People. Obvisously, it's been a long time. But people have been sending me so much dreck of late...Strangely some of the dreck has been picked up by Pocket Books...It was on the occult."
Has anybody else
picked up your Hat People yet?
I just realized that novel of yours could have been an absurdist surreal masterpiece.
"Absudist, surreal masterpiece." I like the sound of that.
Alfie, the manuscript is on its way!
How did I achieve my goal?
Seem like by hard living, a supportive wife--and pure accident.
Ivan, What strikes me about your essay is the realization that we all make mistakes in our quest for greatness. If it makes you feel any better: one step below the journalist hack is the convict-teacher hack. Still, we manage to move on; unlike the angry prisoner I mentioned in this post.
Pretty good reply, Jim.
People are either too complicated or too simple. I haven't decided which.
So true. I can't imagine how hard it would be to be married to a cop. There was a report in my state over the weekend about a cop who was killed in a drive by shooting. He has a wife and children. Yesterday was Mother's Day. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. They suffer.
I guess the old adage is true; Hindsight IS 20/20.
Post a Comment