Memoirs

Last fall my wife suggested a diary as a Christmas gift for our son who is seven. I told her I had mixed feelings.

When I was young I got a diary for Christmas, and I decreed it the greatest present ever because it combined my two favorite subjects: writing and me. But the gift turned out to be bittersweet because I couldn’t use it until the new year. And that remains the most agonizing week of my life. I’d hate to put our son through a week like that.

It intrigued her that I’d kept a diary, probably because she knew its contents would embarrass me. To that end, she suggested we scrounge through the junk in my mom’s basement. I told her the diary was collecting maggots in some landfill, and that even the maggots were bored with it.

Back then, any of my brothers who unlocked the diary with a toothpick were surely disappointed by the entries—and they couldn’t have expected much in the first place. With few exceptions and with minimal variations in stylistic technique, I’d recorded whether I had a headache and what I’d had for dinner.

On Fridays I noted whether the good shows aired, such as “The Brady Bunch” and “The Partridge Family.” Too often these viewing treasures were pre-empted in favor of some low-rent circus that had skittish acrobats, lazy clowns, and elephants just phoning it in. (This circus may have been the inspiration for a fake ad I co-wrote for my college newspaper in 1984. It was a full-page spread, headlined “Bargain Circus.” Highlighted acts included “The Bearded Man,” “The Heavy-Set Guy,” and “Joey the Banana Swallower.”)

Against better judgement, I disclosed to her that somewhere in my mom’s basement there exists an autobiography I wrote in the fifth grade.

“The life story of a fifth-grader?” she asked with a wry grin.

Indeed, no one so young should be so presumptuous as to write an autobiography, except King Tut.

But that hadn’t stopped me. It all began when I was in the fourth grade and learned the fifth-graders were assigned to write their autobiographies. I soon begged our English teacher, Sister Roberta, to assign the same for us.

This was 1973, a period when nuns were becoming “with it,” as defined by someone like Norman Lear. Overnight, these formidable figures discarded their black habits and gowns for denim skirts and paisley blouses, and they renounced their patriarchal religious names as well: Sister Michael Janet became Sister Trish, for instance, and Sister John became Sister Becca. Likewise, the school adopted an Age of Aquarius mentality whereby the student was always right.

So you can imagine the anguish Sister Roberta felt as she considered my request.

A couple days later, she unhappily said, “I spoke with the other teachers, and we agreed that fourth-graders haven’t had enough life experiences to write their memoirs.”

But a year later, they deemed us ready.

My autobiography was twice as long as all the others, owing to self-importance more than to any breadth of experience. Many of the adventures I wrote of were fabricated, which is why it fetched an E.

“An E?” she asked.

My school had renounced the A-to-F grading scale. It was imperialistic and demeaning. But an E was equal to an A, and so my head throbbed with pride—until a friend claimed my document was boring.

“Truth is, I’ve never fully recovered from that.”

Nodding, my wife said, “That explains a lot. Instead of a diary, let’s get the boy a basketball.”