assignment #1

in an effort to make a personal connection with my creative writing students at west ottawa, i decided to try my hand at the writing assignment i've given them. it's a personal narrative.

the grading criteria are as follows:
- narrative must include at least 2 fragments and at least 2 similes or metaphors.
- narrative must show not tell.
- narrative must include honest detail and description.
- narrative must not include any grammar or verb tense errors.

see what you think...

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Can Chip come out and play? He can’t. He’s being punished. His parents look at me like I’m an escaped convict. Chip and I are guilty of the same crime, but he’s sitting on a chair in the corner and I’m hopefully and ignorantly knocking on their front door like I do every other Saturday.

My parents practice passive aggressive punishing. Instead of grounding me or sending me to my room or making me sit in a chair in the corner, they just give me a look. You know the look. All parents give them. The look that feels like itchy wool sweaters and too tight turtlenecks. The look that makes you feel guilty for being born. Even though it’s not like being born was your idea in the first place. But still the look makes you feel responsible for something. Something bad. Well, they gave me the look already and I promptly learned my lesson and headed back over to my next-door neighbor Chip’s house to see what more mischief we could stir up on this balmy summer afternoon.

Chip’s real name is Charles, but one day he decided he wanted people to call him Chip and wouldn’t take Charles or Charlie or Chuck for an answer. Somehow he managed to convince everyone on our block. And so now his name is Chip. And that’s what we call him.

Chip and I and sometimes my younger sisters and sometimes his older sister play in the tree fort down the street. It’s not really a fort at all. It’s really just a big clump of pine trees in our neighbors’ front yard. But our neighbors are nice and they let us invade their property. So we pretend it’s our house and sweep pathways around the trees to make hallways and we ride on droopy pine branches and pretend to be cowboys or cowgirls.

Today it was just Chip and me at the tree fort. And we were finished riding tree horses and sweeping up pathways and stocking the pantry with rocks and pinecones for dinner. We were bored. And it was balmy. So we decided to go explore the tiny white boathouse on the river in our nice neighbors’ backyard. I don’t know what made us do it. We must have been feeling invincible or maybe just stupid. Sometimes I’m not sure there’s a difference. But whatever the reason, we did it. We took everything off the shelves in that tiny white boathouse and, with reckless abandon, chucked each item one by one into the water. We watched purple glass vases and green plastic tackle boxes sink slowly to the sandy river bottom while we waved goodbye to old wooden oars floating downstream in the current. Splash, dunk, plunk. With every toss, like little swimming pool cannonballs, the water jumped up and licked our shins. We were five-year-old masters of the universe and other people’s fishing equipment.

Until our nice neighbor who doesn’t seem so nice when he’s leading you down the middle of the empty street like a death row inmate back to your house to face ‘the look' from your parents came in and caught us red-handed. Then we were just five-year-olds again. Five-year-old criminals with red hands and wet shoes.