Almost Thirteen, Almost Blue Leaves

Almost Thirteen, Almost Blue Leaves

By: Dave Woehrle

(for Jim Fredricksen)

Mr. Fred was the cool teacher: hip and soft-spoken, willing to laugh and nod. He knew who the Smashing Pumpkins were. He was in a band. He had nice glasses.

Most importantly, he let us loiter and listen to Hendrix CDs in his classroom before the bell rang for first period in middle school.

My friends and I would stand around, punching each other’s arms. We were hopeless hormones, dumb energy in Vans shoes and No Fear shirts. We talked about boobs and skateboards. We were almost thirteen.

I went to his class for third period Language Arts. We had something called “Workshop,” a term that sounded magical yet professional, like we were ingenious cobblers. Most of us sat together in groups, doodling in notebooks, writing raunchy limericks about the newest make-out rumors. Making out was called “Frenching” then.

 Mr. Fred brought in art books on a cart from the library, hoping to inspire. Most of us looked through the art books for nudes. We were almost thirteen.

But I eventually sat alone during Workshop. I wanted to brood and sigh, because that’s what I thought real writers did. I wanted to look mysterious and smart, in contrast to my immature friends, therefore getting girls to like me. I was also almost thirteen.

However, sitting alone and thinking was remarkable. How often do you get to really hang out with your own brain? I liked the freedom to mentally marinate.

On most days, I couldn’t think of anything to write. The blank page laughed at me. Damn, I thought, how do writers do it?

One day I found a collection of Winslow Homer paintings on the cart and began flipping through the images. The colors were deep and rich, peppered with gray men doing gray things on the American landscape out east. I’d never taken the time to really look at any paintings in my life, but now I suddenly had time to absorb something other than middle school’s blind cruelty, the cliques and arbitrary taboos, the shifting goal posts of Cool.

I don’t remember the title, but one painting had a dark shore with dark waves and a boat at the water’s edge. Why this image caught my eye, I’ll never know, but I started writing about it, making up a narrative, how and why the boat was abandoned, what monsters the waves hid, what the air smelled like near the sand, and the man who’s looking for his boat or something more in the expansive Atlantic. Suddenly, I had something to write about, a jumping-off point.

I learned an important writing lesson: make shit up as you go along, write about what you see and feel. It may not be good, but at least it’s something.

Mr. Fred squatted by my desk to get eye-level with me and asked what I was writing. “This painting,” I said. “I like this painting.”

He asked what I liked about it.

I said, “I don’t know. I can’t tell, really.”

And he nodded and smiled, knowing we arrive at the best answers ourselves.

A week later, Mr. Fred brought in an overhead projector. He put up a transparent page with the black letters “My life is blue leaves.” Then he said the words, “My life is blue leaves.” He asked us what we thought it meant. Most of us giggled, calling it nonsense.

“I don’t know what that means. How could anything be blue leaves? I’ve never seen blue leaves. Are they, like, frozen?” someone asked.

But he waited, letting us digest the oddness and beauty of the phrase.

He then explained images to us, the power of words to paint and convey the abstract and the concrete; how we compare things to one another because that’s how we can arrange life in understandable chunks. Words could be life if placed in the right order.

He was probably giving us seventh-graders a little too much credit intellectually, but that respect of our minds made our minds change.

Suddenly, we all wrote more, tried more, thought more.

One of my friends wrote a song about his breakfast of soggy toast. Another wrote about football shoulders pads, how they crunch during a good hit. One girl wrote about her little sister’s tricycle, the wheels and the rust.

I wrote a poem called “Minnesota” about my family cabin up north and turned it in to Mr. Fred after Workshop. The next day, he said, “Dave, I really like these lines: ‘Maybe back home I’m missing something / but I’d rather be here, thinking of nothing.’”

I’ll never forget that feeling: someone reading my words back to me in a delighted tone.

Mr. Fred encouraged details. He encouraged life. Up to that point in my life, I had never met anyone that alive, that curious and open to a world of words.

He asked us to write so we wrote, and he asked us about what we wrote. It was just that simple. No one had ever done that before in my life. Suddenly, what I thought mattered; what I imagined mattered; how I arranged words on a page mattered. Those things didn’t matter before I met Mr. Fred.

We were almost thirteen. We were on the brink of an immensely convoluted era of existence. I can’t imagine going through it without my journal, my place of blue leaves.

I’m twenty-seven now. I write everyday. I even get paid to write for local papers. I write because I was told my words were interesting when I was almost thirteen.

Thanks, Mr. Fred.