Why Write?

As a child, I rarely wrote.  I never had a diary.   

I made pictures out of numbers, I created different characters for all the digits. Poor 8 was pregnant, and 9 was a dandy. When I added or subtracted, I invented marriages, divorces, wars, babies. (No wonder I loved arithmetic.)

I created shoebox dioramas of the Seminoles, the Navajo, the Algonquin. Every box had its own little family.  I pasted gold stars on black paper to show the constellations against the night sky—I knew almost every constellation, I memorized every myth behind them. Oh, how I longed for a telescope!   

I stood on my mother's kitchen table and sang I'm No Fool to her astonished friends. I was a terrible ham. I played Puck in Midsummer's Nights Dream.

I collected rocks and minerals, testing each of my samples carefully on a hardness scale.  I labelled every index card. I was ecstatic when I found a piece of obsidian, the beautiful black volcanic glass.  I'd tell myself, this is part of the planet's history in my hands. Rocks were magical.

But words? They didn't have magic. Even now I don’t have one of those huge vocabularies that make writing easy.   

I never felt writing was my destiny, but I didn't believe in destiny.

Maybe it's because I was raised without religion: heaven is a kind of destiny, isn't it?  My dad mocked "morons" who prayed merely because their father or their grand-father or their great-grandfather had done the same. That's destiny, too, following the generations that came before you. You know where you're going, others have been there.  We were free to carve our own path.   

But where? I'd, somehow, become someone, maybe a housewife, maybe a doctor. It wasn't a dream, it was an obligation. Nothing pulled me in any direction.  When the time came, I didn't mind work, I ended up making good money.  It's not as if I'd sacrificed other talents, had I?

A few years ago, my brother-in-law showed me watercolors and pastels that he'd discovered inside a mahogany armoire that my sister had taken after my mother's death.  "A surprise," he called them.

"These are lovely," I said. "Who did them?"

"You did these," he said.

I couldn't imagine that I had painted them. Girls with balloons, lovely mountains, filled with joyful, explosive colors.

He pointed to my childish signature.  "You had talent. You should have them"

I began to remember. Hours alone in my bedroom, I painted, I drew; I lost all sense of time, I loved the feel of pastels, the fluidity of watercolors. I copied Art Nouveau drawings. I'd entered (and been a finalist in) a fashion illustration contest in my teens, so I must have sensed that I had talent.  Yet, I never felt I could be an artist.   Not once.   

But I don’t regret not painting. I don’t' regret not acting, not singing. They're all things I used to love, or things I never got to love. They're foreign places, they're dots on a map.

    

Yet writing, of all things, feels like home. Not a first love, but where I feel most myself, closest to my memories. Perhaps that is what destiny is, the thing that brings you full circle.