An essayist is born | Ammi Midstokke
In the spring of 1990, when I was 11 years old and newly minted in the public school system, I hammered out an essay on purple paper with an ancient typewriter.
My dad had recently met the neighbors, whose private beach we had turned into our secret swimming spot. When they arrived in summer from their Palo Alto home, instead of kicking us off their land, they pulled their floating dock into the water so we could jump off of it.
We lived above the lakeshore by 2 miles of dirt road, disconnected from a lakeside HOA of retired or wealthy, and were regularly kicked off their tennis courts and docks.
We kept returning anyway. The only time we saw other children was when they were visiting their grandparents during summer vacation. They had cleaner clothes than us, but could never catch the snapping turtles and got squeamish about putting grasshoppers on fishing hooks. None of them had ever seen Bigfoot, which further diminished the credibility of city kids.
“These spaces are for people in the HOA,” the association told us, in a shielded form of age and country riffraff discrimination. They said it in front of the visiting kids, who didn’t even know where the geese laid their eggs, but were given reigning privilege of the bay and told to steer clear of us scrappy hilltop, homeschooled kids. In the winter, we’d break into their abandoned houses of sheetless mattresses, and steal what small treasures we could find: nail polish, a can of chili.
The people who shared their several hundred feet of silver-pebbled and secluded beach were liberals, which may have been where I learned the word. He was a retired architect, and his wife of Finnish descent was always learning a new instrument or language or art form.
Their adult son, Pete, lived with them on account of his schizophrenia, which kept him medicated in a way that made him seem like a cloud that was hovering around the dinner table, until he spoke. It was rare that he spoke, but when he did, it was always something good, like an observation of how pretty all airline stewardesses were.
The neighbors believed in the arts. When they pulled Pete out of college because the voices had grown too destructive, he learned how to paint, or maybe it was just in him all along. His paintings were as simple and complex as he was: entire landscapes of story, told in five colors.
One day, the summer-neighbors gave me that heavy typewriter. It was the kind where your fingers develop tiny biceps from pushing down the keys. I begged for my mom to go to the store and get me ribbon so I could restore the machine and write the Great American Novel. While I have volumes of handwritten diaries, there is little evidence of my typing years.
Except this essay, titled “Earth Day,” that has B+ scrawled on the front, with no indication of why it did not merit a higher score. As far as I can tell, it was – and remains – a work of genius, if not a prophetic page of prose. The question, it seems, was what would happen in the future, and I am happy to report that, even at the age of 11, I had established a precarious tightrope walk between calamity and optimism.
“We may have a cure for AIDS, but what good will that do if we’re not alive?” I posit. I suggest that we’ll run out of gas and have to ride bikes, though wonder if I might use a hot-air balloon instead (demonstrating my limited knowledge of how hot-air balloons function). I worry what we’ll do if we drink all the water, if all the animals go extinct, or we start World War III. (Check, check, and check.) Bread might cost $50 a loaf, and “Instead of books, we would all have little pocket computers.”
For a kid who lived without electricity or running water, I was pretty perceptive about over-reliance on technology, even as I touted the possibility of air bikes and air scooters. One can hope.
The neighbors asked often about my writing, and I sent them typed letters with excessive punctuation. When in doubt, more exclamation marks seemed a solid strategy. They celebrated every paragraph and believed wholeheartedly in my pursuit of becoming a playwright or novelist, or my pursuit of anything, really.
Every Christmas, the husband wrote a letter that left us in stitches: an instruction manual about his new pacemaker (with photographs of a broken water pump and diagrams for operation). They sent wild gifts, like Sea Monkeys, which I had never seen, but both my parents lit up like it was 1964 and they were 7 again. The letters, like the typewriter, were of great influence to my writing career before I even knew I had one.
But the summer neighbors were elderly already, and so I never got to tell them thank you in the way they deserved. First the wife died, leaving the husband bereft for his remaining years, and the Christmas letters stopped. It was just the two men who came every summer, a pair of womanless bodies in a house that slowly lost the shine and color she brought to it. One does not recognize the substance of others until it fades with their ghost.
Yet somehow, they seemed to recognize the substance of me, even as it was forming in my young mind and eager fingers. There are those who see beyond the trappings of our circumstance – our dirty jeans and unkempt hair and poverty and lack of education – into the possibilities of light and wonder that are unfurling in young and tender tendrils of promise.
I don’t know how to send gratitude into the afterlife. I can only hope the tip-tapping of my fingers on the keys these days transcends the veil between us.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com