I can remember the moment precisely when the magic began. I was eight, a not-very-outstanding third grader in Mrs. Webb’s class. I didn’t care much for school. I never had. My world in those days was the broad, swampy creek that ran below our house; that and my beloved pets. School was something that got in the way of my enjoyment of these things.
On one particular morning, my reading group had been sent back to our desks to do our seatwork, while Mrs. Webb listened to the next group read. On my desk, under my workbook, I had hidden a piece of paper, and instead of doing what I should have been doing, I sneaked the opportunity to write. At home I had a dachshund, which had been a present to me from my mother on my seventh birthday, and I made him the hero of a rather lurid tale involving our old mother cat and a band of marauding, eye-plucking crows. So absorbed did I become in spinning this tale that I failed to notice Mrs. Webb on the move, and what inevitably happens to eight-year-old girls who do not do their reading workbooks happened. Mrs. Webb snatched the story away from me and I had to stay in from recess to do my work.
The incident itself was minor, the sort of thing to which I was unfortunately rather prone, and as a consequence, I forgot all about it. Then, a couple of weeks later, I was ill and kept out of school for a few days. When I returned, I had to stay after school that afternoon to make up some of the work I had missed. Mrs. Webb apparently took this opportunity to clean out the drawers of her desk. Anyway, when I had finished, she handed over a piece of paper to me. “Here, I think this is yours,” she said. It was the story about my dog and the crows.
Collecting my coat and belongings to go home, I began to read it as I walked down the school corridor, dark and silent because all the other children had left so long before me. Once at the end of the hall, I pushed open the heavy double doors of the school and then sat down on the concrete steps at the entrance to finish reading.
That precise moment I remember with such exquisite clarity—the feel of the cold concrete through my skirt, the late-autumn sunshine transposed against the darkness of the school entranceway, the uncanny silence of the empty playground, even the faint anxiety of knowing that I should be on my way home because my grandmother would worry if I was too late. The paper, however, held me spellbound.
It was all there: my dog, his adventure, the excitement such melodramatic experiences always created in me. I felt just as excited by the story reading it as I had been writing it. Astonished when I realized this, I lowered the paper. I remember lowering the paper, looking over the top of it, seeing someone’s hopscotch game chalked onto the playground asphalt, and being overwhelmed by a sense of insight. Wow! I had always written because I found writing like pretending: an opportunity to turn myself into someone else for the moment I was doing it and be that individual, feeling his or her feelings and experiencing his or her adventures; but once the act of creation was over, I had never really gone back to what I had written. Now here it was, two weeks later, and I was feeling exactly what I had experienced earlier when I was writing it. Exactly. Again. As if the two weeks hadn’t happened. I had stopped time. There, on the school steps, I knew I had stumbled onto magic of the first order. Real magic!
For the rest of my childhood, through my adolescence and into adulthood, writing compelled me. It was an internal, almost autonomic, activity, like circulation or digestion, that happened simply as a natural part of me. I wrote in all forms: diaries, anecdotes, stories. I wrote to understand other people, to give myself the opportunity to be inside them a while and see what it felt like to see the world from another point of view. I wrote to understand emotions and experiences I had not yet encountered. And I wrote to understand myself.
It proved a powerful, if somewhat unusual, education. In particular, it fostered my abilities to be objective and to empathize, which in turn allowed me a greater general acceptance of differences; and, of course, it made me a keen observer.
I was in the final year of a doctorate I hadn’t meant to find myself doing. I had weathered the mainstreaming law that had so disconcerted me the year I’d had Sheila. Although still not happy with all aspects of its implementation, I’d returned to the classroom a couple of years later and taken up teaching again as a “centered” resource teacher, which meant I stayed in the same room but the children came and went. It wasn’t quite as fulfilling as having my own class, but at least I saw the same boys and girls on a regular basis.
Then the administration in Washington changed and with it, the general attitude of the country. Issues I’d fought heart and soul to see achieved a decade earlier were swept away with a single signature. Lower taxes and cuts in public spending became the bywords of the day. Because treating handicapped children in the public schools is labor intensive, and thus expensive, ours were among the first programs to be targeted. Further emphasis was put on placing special education children in the regular classroom as the cheaper alternative. We were being forced to respond to children in ways that were not necessarily the most beneficial to the child—or the teacher, either, for that matter, as many regular education teachers had little grounding in dealing with handicapped children. These philosophies, however, were the only ones that allowed us to process children through the system at the cost demanded of us by the government. The market economy was now being applied to education.
Angry at this change and all too aware that if I continued in the classroom, I too would soon find myself unemployed, I’d decided to work on a doctorate in special education. This was a stupid decision. The degree would overqualify me for the only part of the special education hierarchy I genuinely loved: teaching. Worse, it threw me into the hotbed of those creating the theories that I was trying to escape. Consequently, my heart was never in it.
I coped by finding other outlets. In this case, it was the continuation of my long-standing research into psychological language problems. This work was of little interest to my colleagues in special education; however, I soon found a niche across campus in the university hospital complex. There, in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, among others, I discovered willing partners among the psychiatrists and other professionals. Despite my hybrid credentials, my ideas were accepted and encouraged and my research flourished.
As always, I continued to fill my spare time with writing. Indeed, I was writing more then than at any previous time; in part, I suspect, because I wasn’t fully engaged in my work.
The desire to write about my experiences with Sheila had been with me for some time. I had saved a lot of material from that class, not with the intention of using it to back up writing at a later date, but just because I was a bit of a hoarder and a sentimental one at that. Although I hadn’t kept a daily diary while working in the class, I had kept copious anecdotal records; moreover, I had had liberal use of a video camera, and as a consequence, had quite a lot of Sheila on tape. I went through these things periodically, and all the while I could hear Sheila in my head: the inflections in her voice, the strange lilting grammatical constructions. I had to write it down. I had to liberate those five months from the onward rush of time.
Then, driving home on the freeway from work one dark January evening, the beginning came to me: I should have known. I went home and started writing. Eight days and 225 pages later, I was finished.
It was only in the aftermath that I realized what had happened. At 225 pages, this wasn’t a little something done for my own amusement, it was a book. I knew then that I had to find Sheila and let her read it before the matter went any further.
The job advertisement that caught my eye was for a small private psychiatric clinic in a major city about four hours’ drive west of Marysville.