Kinetic Writer

On January 31, 1986, I was having fun during first grade indoor recess at my elementary school in Painesville, Ohio. You can see the approximate location of Painesville on this Ohio Geological Survey map, where it is surrounded in red and marked with the word “epicenter.” As in, epicenter of a 4.96 magnitude earthquake that remains the third largest in Ohio’s history.

Here’s what I wrote about my experience several months later in October 1986 (verbatim, despite my urge to edit my second grade words):

© oct. 1 1986 (true story) Author: Yvette Beaudoin
My friends and I in the Earthquake at SCHOOL.

Yvette Beaudoin was almost eight years old when she wrote this. She was in the second grade. The earthquake happend at 12:45 P.M. Jan. 31, 1986 Mrs. Schumanns room. In our class we were right in the middle of recess. My friend Shanda Beherns was write drawing on the chalkboard when one of the lights almost fell on to her. Almost the whole class was screaming. Of course the whole class was frightend. Even the teachers were scared. THE END

It’s an interesting written record/piece of memorabilia to own for a couple of reasons.

• I don’t believe that it was written on assignment because there are no teacher marks or comments, which means that I took the initiative to record that gripping story on my own (I mean, wow, even the teachers were scared!).
• I clearly thought that it was publication-ready since I took the time to copyright it and make it known who the author was, even though I listed my name in the story (in the third person, before I switched to first person without even a paragraph break… jeezus, why can’t my inner editor just shut up already! I was practically still a fetus at that point in my writing career!). And I spelled my friend’s last name incorrectly.
• The self-portrait I drew of myself (all fancy-like, with pencil, red pen, and black pen) depicts me with a striped dress, and though I know which dress it’s supposed to be, I can’t say for sure that that’s what I was wearing on the day of the earthquake. I did have long hair and bangs, though I doubt that my feet were adorned with little red elf shoes.
• I deliberately lied about my age in the story to play into my fantasy that I was actually a year older. Yep, I was almost seven years old when I wrote that, and perpetually the youngest in my class… maybe hoping that in the future, when I re-read the story, I would actually believe and perhaps be profoundly impressed by the “fact” that a mature almost-eight-year-old had written the story. Instead, I’m just embarrassed by my lying ways.
• The official report of this earthquake says that it started at 11:47am EST, but my report puts it at 12:45pm. I don’t think I would have lied about the time as freely as I lied about my age, but I wonder why I was an hour off. (Here I am assuming that adults at the time were capable of reporting the correct time.)
• I love that the earthquake happened in Mrs. Schumann’s room. Not in the school, the city, or the state… but specifically in my classroom. It illustrates that my worldview was very narrow at that time.

Aside from just being an interesting piece of my own personal history and early adventures in journalism, there is more that can come of this story. (I’m a writer! There can be more written about everything!) Pulling strictly from my memory as an adult, I have vivid memories of small flashes of time surrounding the earthquake.

When it began, I was drawing on the green chalkboard with my friend Shanda. Then, as I tried to stand still, the cover of an overhead fluorescent light swung down and narrowly missed Shanda’s head. I don’t remember being afraid, but I remember the classroom shaking around me and not knowing what to do.

Somehow the whole class managed to line up at the door and, as we had practiced during tornado drills, filed into the closest girls’ bathroom and knelt on the floor with our hands covering our necks. I remember a quiet tension in the bathroom, which had peach-colored stalls and a floor covered with small tiles. After the quake stopped and time passed, the teacher softly told us that we could get up and return to the classroom.

The teacher thanked my classmate and friend Kristy Beat for having the idea to follow tornado procedures, and the last thing I remember about that day was Jesse my favorite janitor, a tall black man with Michael Jackson’s Bad-era curly hair, putting the cover back on the fluorescent light by the chalkboard. I think I told him how it had almost killed my friend Shanda.

It was Friday, and it had already been an eventful week. My class had been huddled around a small black-and-white television on Tuesday to watch the live launch of NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded on screen only a minute after the launch. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time - I just remember that my teacher gasped and, after a short period of shock, turned off the television and told us to go back to our seats.  I wonder now if she had applied to participate in the Teacher-in-Space project that sent one “lucky” teacher into space and inevitably to her death.

Now, aside from rewriting my personal account of the earthquake, there are a lot of different avenues that could be followed from this experience. I could write a children’s story from a semi-journalistic, semi-personal angle, or I could create a fictional earthquake and fill in the details without worrying about what actually happened. I could write a short story from a fictional teacher’s perspective, imagining that she had been one of the finalists from the 11,000 applications to be the first schoolteacher sent into space.

I could write about a small group of children who experienced a similarly traumatizing week of experiences and explore how they all dealt with it differently. I’m still amazed that I don’t have any lingering trauma from the earthquake, considering how vivid some details are still in my head. I don’t think I was a fearless child, so what made my experience so different from my younger sister’s, who was terrifed by the earthquake experience as a preschooler and had an irrational fear of tornadoes well into her teens?

There are basically limitless options for what or how much I could write with this memory trigger from my early childhood. Of course anything I write will take a lot more effort than just digging up memories and ideas, so I have to be prepared for that. But all of these ideas popped up from a one-paragraph story that I wrote 22 years ago… pretty amazing.

I will continue to take note of my short anecdotes or small ideas, even if that’s all they are, because once they enter my personal cache of experience and memory, who knows what they might turn into someday in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 7:44 pm and is filed under brainstorms & ideas, inner editor, my early writing, personal story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.