A Foolish Figure

I'm just going to finish out 2000 in one swell foop, because I looked at the stories that I had written in the first half of 8th grade and they were all...weird.  Really weird.  The first two are titled "character sketches."  I have the vaguest memory of them, but I don't really know what it was all about.

The names are really funny to me.  Actually, all the names in my old stories.  I loved names.  Even now I have a very long list of the names that I will name my children, provided whoever I marry likes them (the names, not the children) and I actually want to bear...fifteen children.

Yeah.  SO not happening.

Anyway, I really love names, but I used to like really strange ones. All I can say is I really labored over those names.  :-)

So, here we have Character Sketch number one.  I suspect it to be based on a fable.

( The Horses )

I wrote two poems in May of 2000.  They are both filed under schoolwork, but the first, if it really was assigned, and not just misfiled, is still very personal.

I cannot be snarky about this poem, even though it is lacking in literary merit.  I wrote it when an elderly member of our church, who had Alzheimers, died.  Once, a year or so earlier I had written an essay about him for an "Ordinary Heroes" essay competition, and it captures the way I felt about him better than anything I could write now, ten to fifteen years later:

( Ordinary Heroes )

Another long time member of our church died just this Thursday, and she, too, is where she has always wanted to be:  with her Savior where there is no pain, and no loss of memory, and no suffering.   This is the poem I wrote when Mr. Bischoff died, and despite it's artistic downfallings, I dedicate its sentiment to Miss Elaine Hiller as well:


( Immortality )
 
But, as this post is entitled "From the Sublime to the Ridiculous," here is another poem from May 2000 that is extremely ridiculous.  It was an exercise for English class again.  The teacher had wonderful pictures (I don't actually know what they were from...some game, maybe) of really bizarre situations.  In one way they reminded me of Norman Rockwell paintings, but they were photographs, I think.  We had to choose one, and write a poem or a story about it. 

I chose a picture of a very exasperated man at a desk with a cow standing on it:

It appears that around the time that Y2K never happened, I was a very morbid little girl.  Yes, indeed.  Perhaps I was far too taken with Eomer? (See title of post.)  While that is an intriquing possibility, I am inclined to dismiss it.  See, in January 2000 I had only read LotR (and only five or six times at that point), I had not seen the Peter Jackson movie, for the very valid reason that they had not been made yet.  I had seen the animated movies.  But the animated movies did not have the utterly gorgeous Karl Urban in them.  Oh yes, he is utterly gorgeous. If it weren't for him, there would be very little reason to watch Star Trek XI.  True Story.  Anyway.  Because I had only read the books, I did not know what an amazing and beautiful character Eomer was, so I was only really obsessed with Sam Gamgee, and a little bit with Faramir (David Wenham.  *sigh* ...  but I loved Faramir long before David Wenham was born.  Well, long before I had even heard that David Wenham was born.  Two very different time frames, come to think of it.)  

But I digress.

Back to me being morbid.  We had to rewrite an Aesop's fable for a class, and then we had (I think...if anyone is actually reading this, and can identify a source for the second story, I'd like to hear it, because I may be misremembering) to come up with our own moral and write our own story for it.  To see proof that I was morbid, read below.

(Just to prove that you can always find someone worse than you, I should point out that I, at least, did not draw diagrams of interestingly evil torture chambers during indoor recess like most of the boys in my class.)




( Of Nests and Night )

What you are about to read constitutes the high point of my literary career.  It's true.  My seventh grade English teacher was the daughter of the kindergarten teacher (small Christian school=lots of people are related.)  My teacher liked this story and showed it to her mom.  Her mom liked it so much that she read it to the kindergarteners. 

I cannot tell you how much that went to my head...

Well, I can tell you:  It went so much to my head, that I thought it would win a national story competition.  The competition was to write a story about the first thanksgiving.  That's why we had to write the story at all.

I was young and innocent then.  I didn't realize just how politically incorrect it was.  It didn't stand a chance.  *sigh*

I did get to feel a little bit famous for a day or so, though.  I even fantasized about it being turned into a play that would be put on in the Thanksgiving Day program.  Needless to say, that never happened.  Hey, a girl can dream!

I should note that the title was my mom's idea.  I have never seen the TV show that it alludes to. 

( Truth or Consequences )

Some of my creative writing was inspired by my own fevered brain.  Some of my creative writing was inspired by a desire to get an "A" on an assignment.  This poem falls into the latter category.   I bet you can't guess what the assignment was:

( Mr. Bumble )

I don't know if I got an A.  I'm guessing so, because teachers are nice when it comes to creative writing.  Well, my teacher was.