Personal Story #1 Compositions

I have mentioned in the past that our family was not particularly well off when I was growing up.  One of the most noticeable things in my young mind that I found where I was different from my friends was my summer vacation.  Do you remember how you always had to write a “What I did on my summer vacation” story when you got into your new grade?  It was always the first “composition” we had to do and I used to agonize over it from the second year onwards because in my first year I was amazed to hear my classmates tell tales of “going away” on their vacation.  Going away?  Are you kidding me?  Some of the kids went camping with their family which wasn’t too strange but many of them went driving, far, far away, and stayed away for a week or two and sometimes more.  I couldn’t imagine.

The most exciting thing we ever did on vacation was when my mother decided to pack us a picnic lunch and told us to go find a place to have a picnic (and stay away all day).  Woot, woot.  We were on that like a tick on a deer.  She would make us peanut butter and jam sandwiches, sometimes change it up and make peanut butter and cinnamon spread sandwiches.  We’d have Freshie (the cheap version of Kool-aide) and maybe some cookies or fruit as an extra treat.  She’d give us a blanket which we could use as a fort (we lived in Ontario so we had plenty of trees to adventure through).  We also had a creek near by and of course we were forbidden to go there but we (naturally) forgot all about that and traipsed down there for our adventures.  We had every imaginable adventure, re-created from our favorite TV shows and most of the drama included screaming a lot, capturing someone and most exciting of all, torturing them.  We had a great time and always came home filthy and hungry at supper time.

That was our vacation, summer after summer.  Since I had class with the same kids year after year I didn’t know what to write about because I wasn’t creative enough to believe I could actually lie about what we did.  At this late date I have really no idea what I wrote but I do recall feelings of agony as soon as the words came out of the teacher’s mouth.

“Now, let’s start our composition class with writing about what you did this summer”.