The written page prehaps not yet set down.

At the age of 9, that last weekend of May as we planned to leave on a family vacation, I broke both arms and tore myself up pretty good.  I've blogged that in the past and you can find it in my Multiply archives if you care to look.  But that summer of healing was also a summer of re-creation of a little girl's mind and heart.  I cannot explain all that happened, but like May 9, 1996, it was a pivotal time in my life. 
The war of good and evil had begun in my heart and body way too early.  I knew inward struggles at the age of 9 that many children do not know - nor should they.  I had frequent nightmares and a horrid shameful incontinance born of psychological disfunction.  I was introspective and yet my hyperactive nature kept me from isolation in many ways.  I was already becoming a weird little kid.  I prayed to a God that was really too good and too far to listen to my personal terrors and malfunctions.  Yet, I still prayed.
I was a creative kid even then.  My walk was really a dance.  My drawings were really dreams.  My music -ah my music was a personal vendetta against repression.  I'd taken piano lessons two different times and disliked both experiences immensely.  I toyed with contriving melodies.  I wouldn't call what I did back then composing.  But it was something akin to composing and I had enough knowledge that I often tried to write the music down.
Yet during that summer of healing I tried my hand at a new thing.  It was several weeks after the accident before I was cognizant enough to care about how bored I was.  The piano was an impossible thing, though I could pick a little here and there. The one fingered approach was far from satifying. My dance was slowed to a creep without bounce and a pencil or brush was out of the question for the greater part of a summer.
But we owned a typewriter.  It was an old black typewriter with a carbon ribbon and a hand advance on the side.  Corrections were made by big XXXs or starting on a fresh sheet when it got too bad.  It was a creative media that really worked okay one slow pick at a time.  That summer, I learned to write.  Of course I knew my alphabet and how to spell and make sentences, but I had never really written anything that did not already exist somewhere in the world of abc's.  I wrote small poems and short stories.  It became a way to give solidity to my fantacies. 
I already had been given a love of books, aquired by my mother's persistance at reading to me nightly.  It was the one thing that we truly shared in an amiable way as I was growing up.  And I had learned to entertain myself during my common insomnia by making up stories.  Yet they were always done and gone when I finally fell asleep. 
That summer I learned to save a story, to create a rhyme and make it better.  It didn't fix anything, but it changed something deep inside that made life a little more doable.  To this day, when I get so full of question or anger or joy or frustration that I cannot concentrate, I take to page: sometimes for expression, sometimes for diversion and sometimes for answers.