The Early Stuff: An Introduction
On childhood stories, becoming an adult, and filling up your car with diesel gasoline
My kids ask me a lot of questions. “Why are you so hairy?” “Is there such thing as a drone store?” “If you love me, why don’t you carry me that much?” “But who made God?” Their questions vary, as you can see, from the insulting to the deeply philosophical. But the most common subgenre is the question-as-request: “Can you pour me some milk?” “When can I get a phone?” “Can you go away now?” And of all the requests they make in question form, the one I like the most is this: “Can you tell us a story from when you were a little kid?”
I get that one a lot, more than I ever would’ve expected. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised: my granddad always told stories from when he was young, and my dad does the same thing, and I always loved hearing them. There’s something special about getting a glimpse of a time when the adults in your life were just kids. I’ve always loved telling those kinds of stories, too, especially the ones where I get to laugh at myself. There’s pleasure in remembering even the cringiest moments from childhood and adolescence if you get to turn those moments into a story.
So I’ve told my kids a bunch of stories from when I was a little kid. Stories about bee stings and broken mailboxes and slipping on sharp rocks into a pond that I’d been warned to stay away from. Stories where I was “bad.” Stories that might have a lesson or might not. Stories that they ask me to retell later. Stories that only create in them a hunger for more stories, more, more, more, rather than gratitude for the one I just told. “Tell us another one,” they say, as soon as the previous one ends.
The essays I’ll be posting here are my attempt to tell some more stories, stories about growing up. Some of the stories might be from when I was really young, but most of them will be stories about trying to navigate the weird, thrilling, confusing, rocky, sometimes painful path from childhood to adulthood. Most of us find ourselves on that rocky path pretty early and some of us stay on that path a long time. The stories I tell here will run the gamut: elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, maybe even in the early years after college. A lot of them will involve me humiliating myself in some way. But even the non-embarrassing ones will usually be about times when I was trying (and struggling) to figure out who I was, what I loved, who or what I was supposed to be, how I fit into the world, how I was supposed to treat other people. To put it a slightly different way: I’ll be writing about experiences that taught me something, either in the moment or in retrospect.
Besides my kids, there’s another group of people that hears a lot of my stories: my students. The difference is that my students don’t ask me to tell stories, but I keeping telling them anyways. I always have, from my first days as a twenty-two year-old high school English teacher to now, as a reluctantly middle-aged dude teaching writing to first-year college students. Sometimes I tell a story just to try to wake them up, other times I tell a story only because one comes to mind, but most of the time I try to tell stories that have a purpose, stories that attempt to offer insight about something I wish I would’ve realized when I was their age.
Basically, I tell them about stupid things I’ve done, hoping they might learn from those stupid things and avoid making the same mistakes. I’ll be doing that here, too.
One of my all-time favorite coming-of-age novels is Jane Austen’s Emma, a book whose plot is basically this: a young person who thinks she knows everything makes a series of painful mistakes. After the twenty year-old Emma makes one of her mistakes, involving a major misreading of a male character’s intentions, the narrator notes that Emma would be happy to never see the young man again, except “as a source of profitable humiliation to her own mind.” Oh my goodness, I love that. Profitable humiliation! What a phrase! The idea, of course, is that Emma might profit from her humiliating experience by learning something from it, thus avoiding a similar mistake in the future.
The Early Stuff will describe my own profitable humiliations. Sometimes, though, the humiliations never actually profited me at all. They just sucked. But that’s the cool thing about turning them into stories: raw experience transforms into something else, something that might even benefit another person.
One time, at the end of high school, I accidentally filled up my non-diesel car with diesel gasoline. It was late and I wasn’t paying attention. (I hadn’t been drinking, FYI. I was the All-Time Designated Driver.) I only realized my mistake after I’d filled up the entire tank. I drove several miles home, my Explorer lurching and sputtering the whole way. The engine got really messed up, but I made it. My dad, a very practical person, was both pissed off and in a sort of awe that a child of his could even do something like this. “How?” he kept saying, shaking his head. “How did you fill up your car with diesel?”
Later, though, after the Explorer had been fixed (at a hefty price), I tried to see the bright side. Talking to my granddad about the whole fiasco, I said, “Well, at least I learned from my mistake.”
Usually my biggest supporter, my granddad didn’t buy this logic.
“Some things you shouldn’t have to learn from mistakes, son,” he said. “Some things you should just know.”
So, yeah, maybe some of my stories will be about errors so idiotic that everybody should already know not to do that. But most of these essays, I hope, will be about things that we all struggle with. Sure, we all grow up in vastly different circumstances, with vastly different experiences, with vastly different advantages and disadvantages, but nobody (or at least nobody I’ve met yet) finds the transition from childhood to adulthood to be easy.
I’m hoping these essays can help with that transition—especially the difficult transition from high school to college, which I struggled with and which I see many of my students struggle with—or at least make that transition feel a little less lonely. But I’m also hoping these essays will be worth reading for those of us who made that transition a long time ago and are still trying to make sense of it. Adolescence (and childhood in general) is something we never fully recover from. We’re all still trying to figure out what happened back there. Maybe these essays will give you a chance to reflect on and share some of your own growing-up stories, your own profitable humiliations.
The plan is to post a different essay on here each month, for as long as I can. Some of them will be revised versions of letters I’ve written for my students over the past few years, focusing especially on mistakes I made as a college student1. Others will be stories I’ve never written down before, stories from my childhood and adolescence that I’ve been wanting to share (and make sense of) for a while. Most of the essays will tie back to the books, movies, and music that I discovered when I was young and still love now2. If you’re interested in all this, I hope you’ll subscribe and maybe even pass this along to somebody else who might be interested, too.
I’ll be posting the first essay in the next week or two. It’s about a brief period near the end of high school when I was the frontman for the worst band in the world. Someone in the story becomes famous, but it’s not me. Hope you’ll stay tuned. [Editor’s note: The first piece did not end up being about that. But we’ll get there eventually!]
One of those letters, about a mistake I made on my first day of college, turned into a short piece I wrote last year for the American Scholar called “How Not to Break the Ice.” You can find it here.
