First section of the memoirs.
No memoir ever really starts in the beginning. And for good reason. Babies are goddamn boring. No one wants to read 4 chapters about baby food, dirty diapers, and teething. Well, I guess some people probably do, but I’m not one of them and I certainly don’t want to be writing for those sorts of people. So baby books be damned.
Rarely will you pick up a good memoir that even begins in the pre-k to 6th grade period of childhood either. I really think this is because most people’s lives at these ages are pretty much the same. Books have to have pop and fizzle to sell. I have to deliver some great reason for you to turn the page, describing my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Hartfield, would be mildly interesting, at best, let alone a reason to turn the page to find out when I mastered my vowels and was shocked to learn that Y went both ways!
However, around middle school the real me began to emerge, and that is true of most people. We all come from the same ball of dough. All just sets of mashed together balls of genes and until we develop personality and characteristics that make us different, we are like cookies without frosting: bland, boring, and with nothing to make us interesting. Who wants a sugar cookie when a cupcake is waiting?
It’s an epiphany, that first moment of self-realization. A bolt of lightening. A shot of ego. That eternal spark that makes us us. Hopefully that isn’t the first, last, and only epiphany for most of us, and the sparks continue to fly into our mind, a grinder working a raw piece of metal, making it smooth and refined. The sparks fly everywhere and sometimes start fires in the people who surround us. As we grow older, the sparks fly less and less, the fire is banked, and, eventually, we die.
My first spark was standing in front of a blackboard in a small private school house in Chandler, IN. I had been asked to do some basic math on the chalkboard and after finishing the prescribed work, scrawled my name across the board. The day was near done, the work completed, it was hardly an act of defiance, as I was breaking no rules. I stood there, looking at my name, written with the penmanship of a typical 5th grader: sloppy, without the distinctions that would come later in life, the straight lines slightly off-center, each letter formed with tongue-jutted effort.
“Write your whole name.”
The words sort of hung out there, a flare over a battlefield. And I realized, standing in front of 5 or 6 of my classmates and friends, that I had no clue how to spell my first name.
My name is a combination of two warring parties. In one corner, my parents, who wished to show their devotion to the Bible by choosing a name from the same. In the other, my grandmother, who wanted a grandson named after herself. And, before you ask or attempt to guess, Billie Bob Bigelow. I’m not sure how that is a woman’s name, but, in Texas, I guess anything is possible. So, much like Macarthur and some nameless Japanese official, without the aircraft carrier setting, the two parties agreed to name me with both sides in mind. William Daniel Vaughn.
With such a charitable donation of the first name to my grandmother’s wishes, one would assume that their generosity had no bounds. That would be incorrect. From the day of my birth I have been called Dan. The joke’s on you Grams!
And, standing in front of a chalkboard, sweating beneath the spotlight gazes of my peers, I wrote across the board, W-I-L-L-Y-U-M.
Phonetically spectacular, I know. Absolutely perfect.
Alas, this twisted world of letters.
It was at that moment, standing up in front of a class and misspelling my name on the chalkboard for everyone to see, that I realized that life was going to be a series of tests, most of which I would fail.-wdv
