I am a writer

Now that sounds like a big statement doesn’t it? Does it mean that I am paid to write – no?

Does it mean that I am a published writer of anything at all – no? Does it mean that what I write is meaningful or important – only for myself.

Actually if one takes the Webster’s (very old edition) definition of a writer the very first simply states: “writer, n. 1. A person who writes”… So what if it goes on to state that 2. This is a person whose business or occupation is writing and then gives the specifics.

I learned to read and write like most of my generation in first grade. We had moved into our new house mid school year so I did not go to kindergarten (did I miss it? Not that I recall other than the status of being able to say that one had gone, which for my entire young childhood was a negative for my friends as they had all been, how weird was I?). Thus it was all new and fresh when I walked into that first classroom.

If I remember how many books I read (62) that first year, I also recall that family folklore has it that I returned from my first day of school and told my parents that I thought that it might take a week to learn to read: I didn’t speak of writing, which is intrinsic to reading.

When did I first write? Not quite so sure, other than the first signs of a continuous type of writing came with our move to Hawaii when I was 13. In order to keep in touch with my friends left behind I had to write letters – of not much importance they are now gone – tossed with one of those frenzies of cleaning.  I do have journals dating back to that period: one bad memory is of the day that my siblings absconded with it and proceeded to read various private phrases out loud.

I have over the years kept journals sometimes writing every day, sometimes going for years with nary a line. I have written thousands if not tens of thousands of letters and like to say that I would be an anthropologists dream (o.k. more like a nightmare with the wealth of material to sort through) as I have notes on most phases of my life.

So I’m a writer, in my own time, in my own corner and mostly just for my own pleasure.