Random facts about Kathryn

My friend Melanie tagged me. It's a chain game among bloggers that, should everyone play, serves to drive traffic to your blog. The crux of the assignment is to list six random things about yourself, then pass the assignment on to six others. I enjoyed reading hers so, in like spirit, here we go. Six random facts about me:

1. I have broken every chain letter or e-mail ever sent to me, even fun ones like this. For one thing, I am new to blogging, and outside of the friends Mel and I have in common, don't yet know six bloggers I could send this to. Plus, I hate to annoy people. So much so, in fact, that when I was young, the anxiety of having to go door to door to sell Girl Scout Cookies—a proven product!—was enough to make me quit Scouts after only one year. (This will mean more to those of you who are acquainted with my high-achieving self well enough to know how painful it was for me to lose the opportunity to continue to earn badges for my sash.)

2. Head connections. 

I once shook hands with champion downhill skier Jean-Claude Killy, who had recently won three medals in the 1968 Olympics. Our neighbor in Baltimore was an executive with Head skis, for which Jean-Claude (oh yeah, first name basis!) was doing a promotion. Since this executive's wife was too pregnant to entertain, my parents had a party at our house in his honor. While guests congregated in the living room and dining room, my four siblings and I, dressed nicely, sat on the couch in the family room until he arrived. After we stood he shook each of our hands, saying our names. With his French accent, mine was "Katrine." Yes, it rhymed with latrine but it was enough to make my 12-year-old heart palpitate. My favorite memory of the day, though: my older sister had been entrusted with making the coffee in one of those big party percolators. After reading the directions to determine how many "cups" of coffee to put in the basket, she used a "one-cup coffee measure" instead of a measuring cup. Espresso it wasn't!

3. It's the process that matters. Before ending my six years at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, by leaving with a master's degree, I had officially declared seven different majors. The only job I ever held that required any of these fields of academic study was a one-year adjunct teaching position at Trenton State College, NJ, for which I earned $600 per semester.

4. Twelve interminable weeks. While student teaching biology in a suburban Cincinnati high school to which inner city students were being newly bussed in 1978: each day I had to reproduce my lesson plan for the third of the class that would need to learn the material by themselves via worksheet while sitting in in-school detention; I was cussed out for being a bigot by the mother of a black boy who I was required to punish for cussing me out during class (I determined a few weeks later that this same boy couldn't even read); a fist fight between two boys broke out in my class; a girl went into hysterics (she literally had trouble breathing) when her lab partner accidentally flung an earthworm off the dissecting needle into her face, requiring that I send her to the nurse; two kids lit up a joint in the back of my biology room, requiring I call the police; and one day the big class bully put the trash can up on the lab counter then picked up hyperactive little Nathan Feldman, folded him in half, and plopped him butt-first into the can. I could not get him down. And to think I'd wanted to teach because I loved biology. I ended up leaving my position early to have a grapefruit-sized ovarian cyst surgically removed, an activity I found much more pleasurable than student teaching. The kids made me a card that everyone signed: "We miss you so much!"

5. Them's me genes. Growing up I had such a crush on my older cousin Bob that I couldn't speak when he was in the room. Maybe it was the genes: we're both descended from a private in the American Revolution whose parents were second cousins. Another family tree fun fact is that my husband and I own property on a lake in northern New York state (as does cousin Bob, who has been married happily for many years to a woman from outside our family). Five generations of my extended family have summered there, but it turns out our ties to the area go back much further: a  local newspaper, in probing the history of the lake, found that the first white man to discover the area was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Esek Earle, in 1813. His first comment upon seeing it for the first time: "I have found a place where we can kill all the deer we need." 

6. Look at this face:

Unbelievable as it seems, and unready as I am, I am a grandmother! Not technically, I guess, as this is my husband's adopted daughter's son. But genetics aside, when you look at a face like that, you find yourself saying, "Can you say, 'Grandma?'"

2008 Central PA Writing Contest: "almost"?

Something magical always happens when I congregate with other writers. That's why, earlier this week, I drove to York College to pick up my honorable mention from Central PA magazine's 2008 Writing Contest. Whether to go was no easy decision: four hours round-trip is a long time to travel for punch, crudites and stuffed mushrooms. After all, I hadn't won one of the top three cash prizes. Should I even bother?

All things ecological and economic considered, it made most sense to let them mail me my certificate. But... what magic might I miss out on? I decided to go.

And I'm so glad I did. At the reception preceding the awards, the other honorees and I introduced ourselves by asking, "Which one did you write?" Often, the answer would be followed by a second question: "Remind me again, what was it about?" That led to the first of three valuable lessons.

Lesson #1: It pays to choose an evocative title. As in, a title that evokes the specific story content, not theme, of your piece. As it turned out, my piece, "The Boys, Harry Potter and Me"  earned instant recognition: I never once had to remind someone what it was about.

Lesson #2: Contest decisions are made by committee, so if you are at the top of the crop, someone liked your piece very much. The senior editor at the magazine told me that one of the other editors responsible for selecting the top ten finalists (York college professors were entrusted with choosing the three cash winners) liked my memoir piece the best, even though fiction typically wins. That sorta kinda almost means something, I think. Maybe.

Lesson #3: Meeting your readers offers the possibility for writing's biggest reward. And here I'm not talking about publication, or a certificate that could be ruined in a mad dash through a rainstorm, or $200 that would be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm talking about something more permanent: learning that you have touched a reader's heart.

One of the other contestants, a young mother of two, told me that the moment she finished reading my entry online she called to her husband in the next room, saying, "You have to read this." He told me he was moved by it, too. That's cool, right? But then she quoted a line that she'd found poignant, and her choice surprised and delighted me: "When had they become men?" She hoped that down the road, once she became a mother distracted by the multiple responsibilities of raising teens, she too would remain aware of all of the miracles of change in her children.

But then I earned my real prize. She said, "My children are a little too young to start reading them the Harry Potter series. But when I do, I won't be able to begin without thinking of you and your boys."

I'm a big advocate of payment for artists, and I need to make a living just like anyone else. I will try to re-sell this piece. As many writers realize, however, there are easier ways to make money. But an effective story can be an indelible way of touching a stranger's life. And for me, banking such memories creates an account that even a recession can't touch.