EVERYDAY I WRITE THE BOOK

I realized many years after the fact that the action in just about all of the stories I wrote in 6th grade commenced on October 19th. And I wrote a lot of stories...

My teacher Mrs. Trueman was a rare bird. She encouraged creativity without bounds. She was unconcerned with my pre-adolescent predisposition to the grotesque, the snarky, the wry, and the whimsical. Room 224 was a safe haven, a place where I could adopt the nom de limerick “The Porno Poet” with no fear of reprisal. Mrs. Trueman would simply conceal a blush, and ask for more poems, more stories...

One of the October 19th stories was set on the Roosevelt Island tramway, and centered on a tram car throwing a wheel off the track, stranding me and my family in midair. By the second page, I realized that I didn’t have much more than the setup, so this was the payoff when the reader turned to page 3:

“Aw, the hell with it. The line snapped, the car plunged to the ground, and we all died. The end.”

She returned it with an “Oh well, back to the drawing board” comment, and a small handwritten smiley face.

Mrs. Trueman helped me navigate through a year of hazards that saw my father hospitalized in March and dead by May.

She sponged off any embarassment I might have felt when the $150 check my mother wrote for the annual 6th-grade trip to the Poconos bounced.

She nursed the wounds of my unrequited crush on dark-haired Shelley.

I looked her up on the internet four or five years ago. I wanted to thank her, and to let her know that for all the stories she might’ve heard over the years— about the long hair and bare feet, the drinking, the drugs, the punk rock, the dropping out, and any other rebellions great and small— that for all these stories, I had made it through.

All I could find when I searched “Eileen Trueman” was her obituary from about a year earlier. Cancer.

So now the tale I tell myself each October 19th is a story about this tolerant, kind, gentle-humored woman. A story that always ends exactly the same:

“I love you, Mrs. Trueman.”