As soon as I finished writing and publishing Broken Jar, I discovered I was hankering to write something a little different. I had always feared jumping into fiction because I just couldn't come up with any new ideas for stories; I am much better at poetic-type composing, even it doesn't go down on paper in poetic form. Then one day it hit me that the truth of my fifth-grade year was possibly even more interesting than fiction, and since probably nobody would believe it was the truth, it technically could qualify as fiction. And by calling the truth "fiction," I could exaggerate and fabricate my head off without it ever truly being lying.
Three weeks later it was done, but a year-and-a-half later it is still unpublished. Maybe I'm not finished, maybe I'm hoping I can get a "real" publisher to pick it up, maybe I'm too broke to publish it myself, maybe I'm just procrastinating.
But blogging is publishing, so I decided that I'd try it out on you. My plan is to publish it here for you to peruse maybe a chapter at a time, at least for a while. We'll see if works out that way. But you need to promise me you will go into this with the proper mindset: you will be journeying into something akin--in pattern, if not in quality-- to To Kill A Mockingbird or Cold, Sassy Tree in that it is from the point of view of a kid, specifically a high-energy, fast-talking fifth grader enthusiastically dedicated to learning as little as possible within the confines of public education. This is not a daily devotional book, although hopefully when you finish, you will feel closer to the Great Listener, the One who deserves our dearest devotion. Prepare to enter the mind of a ten-year-old East Texas tomboy. The year is 1961.
CHAPTER ONE
WITH NO MALICE AFORETHOUGHT
There is a way of living that takes you meandering targetlessly until you show up somewhere. If you were older and wiser, you'd have enough sense to hope that God would be in the place you landed that day or month or year or childhood. If you were even older and even wiser, you'd arrest the development of such targetless meandering and find yourself a destination on some kind of a map before setting out on the road. But I wasn't old, and I wasn't wise. And though I went to Sunday school and church every Sunday, most other days I wasn't thinking much about who or where God was. What I was was young, wildly impulsive, and wholly sold out to goallessness.
I was Georgia Jen Crocker, fifth-grader at Azalea Heights Elementary School. The school was named after nothing and no one. It wasn't even really a name at all-- just a convenient descriptor for the people of our little East Texas town of Azalea Heights to know where to deposit their kids when it came time to start first grade. No one ever told me why we changed the name from"Azalea Heights Grammar School," but somebody did, and it seemed like most people felt kinda proud for giving up something old and traditional and latching onto something cutting edge. Other folks must have felt they had had some prophetic wisdom even in the backwoods of East Texas, though, because they never would acknowledge the school's new name anymore than they would acknowledge the existence of Daylights Savings Time. I didn't have enough sense then to admire their kind of tenacity to tradition or to roll my eyes at the weakness of jumping on every trendy bandwagon that rolled through town. I just swallowed-- hook, line, and sinker-- the new name, and let "Azalea Heights Elementary School" roll off my tongue as easy as too much spit.
As for my name, it was anything but a descriptor. I got my first name from my Aunt Georgia, who never lived anywhere near Georgia, and my second name from the "J" bank of my mother's imagination. It had to be a "J" name to sound good with my sister, Julie's, "J" name. I never could get a clear answer as to why it was just plain "Jen," which sounds more like an abbreviation than a real name, rather than "Jennifer" or "Virginia," which most people who end up with "Jen" start out with. I have often suspected that I got a chopped-off version of a name-- which by the way is the one they ended up calling me instead of my first one-- because I was almost three weeks late entering this word, and Mother thought starting me out with a quarter-note name would hinder any further inclination I might have toward dragging my feet and drawing things out unnecessarily.
If that was her thinking, it must have worked, for I was as slippery and hard to pin down as a tadpole in Tenaha Creek. I didn't set out to be wild, and the way I lived wasn't any kind of "acting out" or "desperate cry for attention" that I would hear about years later in the enlightened and sophisticated world outside the boundaries of Shelby County. I just got up every day of my life back then and took off living it with no spiteful scheming or malice aforethought whatsoever. But the way my days usually wound up in fifth grade, I couldn't have done a better job of wreaking hoodlum havoc if I had sat down and orchestrated some kind of a grand plan.
(from Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke-copyright Jan Doke,2009)
WITH NO MALICE AFORETHOUGHT
There is a way of living that takes you meandering targetlessly until you show up somewhere. If you were older and wiser, you'd have enough sense to hope that God would be in the place you landed that day or month or year or childhood. If you were even older and even wiser, you'd arrest the development of such targetless meandering and find yourself a destination on some kind of a map before setting out on the road. But I wasn't old, and I wasn't wise. And though I went to Sunday school and church every Sunday, most other days I wasn't thinking much about who or where God was. What I was was young, wildly impulsive, and wholly sold out to goallessness.
I was Georgia Jen Crocker, fifth-grader at Azalea Heights Elementary School. The school was named after nothing and no one. It wasn't even really a name at all-- just a convenient descriptor for the people of our little East Texas town of Azalea Heights to know where to deposit their kids when it came time to start first grade. No one ever told me why we changed the name from"Azalea Heights Grammar School," but somebody did, and it seemed like most people felt kinda proud for giving up something old and traditional and latching onto something cutting edge. Other folks must have felt they had had some prophetic wisdom even in the backwoods of East Texas, though, because they never would acknowledge the school's new name anymore than they would acknowledge the existence of Daylights Savings Time. I didn't have enough sense then to admire their kind of tenacity to tradition or to roll my eyes at the weakness of jumping on every trendy bandwagon that rolled through town. I just swallowed-- hook, line, and sinker-- the new name, and let "Azalea Heights Elementary School" roll off my tongue as easy as too much spit.
As for my name, it was anything but a descriptor. I got my first name from my Aunt Georgia, who never lived anywhere near Georgia, and my second name from the "J" bank of my mother's imagination. It had to be a "J" name to sound good with my sister, Julie's, "J" name. I never could get a clear answer as to why it was just plain "Jen," which sounds more like an abbreviation than a real name, rather than "Jennifer" or "Virginia," which most people who end up with "Jen" start out with. I have often suspected that I got a chopped-off version of a name-- which by the way is the one they ended up calling me instead of my first one-- because I was almost three weeks late entering this word, and Mother thought starting me out with a quarter-note name would hinder any further inclination I might have toward dragging my feet and drawing things out unnecessarily.
If that was her thinking, it must have worked, for I was as slippery and hard to pin down as a tadpole in Tenaha Creek. I didn't set out to be wild, and the way I lived wasn't any kind of "acting out" or "desperate cry for attention" that I would hear about years later in the enlightened and sophisticated world outside the boundaries of Shelby County. I just got up every day of my life back then and took off living it with no spiteful scheming or malice aforethought whatsoever. But the way my days usually wound up in fifth grade, I couldn't have done a better job of wreaking hoodlum havoc if I had sat down and orchestrated some kind of a grand plan.
(from Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke-copyright Jan Doke,2009)
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