This month in LitPark, Susan Henderson asked about Promise: "Tell me a story about someone seeing promise in you. What did they see, and how did this affect you?" Here is my reply:
My first grade teacher--the one who tied me to my chair because I wiggled and giggled too much in class--asked me to stay after school one day. I was terrified that I'd really done something bad. When all of the kids had left the room, she pulled out a paint-by-number set and told me that she was giving this to me because I loved to paint. She told me it had been her son's. Earlier in the year we'd learned that her son had been killed in a place with a weird name: Viet Nam.
While growing up I told everyone I wanted to be an artist, a painter. I wanted to pay back the promise Mrs. Jenkins saw in me. To do it though, I had to change the medium from paint, brushes and canvas, to letters, words and paper. Mrs. Jenkins will always hold a special place in my heart.
Go ahead and tell us a story about someone seeing promise in you, then skip on over to LitPark and share it there.
