I SPENT LOTS OF TIME creating stories as a kid.
When it was summer, I loved sitting on our basement computer and typing up stories. One of my favorites was called "My Cat Named Daisy," a story about a girl's talking cat who causes mischief for her. I based it on what I thought my actual cat's personality would be like. My first experience getting plagiarized was when Kelly wrote her own similar story, called "My Dog Named Brittany." This infuriated me to no end!
And then something happened that prompted more storytelling: Christine returning to school.
In first grade, when we first met, we had spent time writing stories about Winnie the Pooh and those creepy Furbies. Pooh Bear would usually be off to a mythical Cave of Dragons because, for some unknown reason, he had to defeat it. Piglet helped him out by sending him tips along the way that somehow magically floated their way down to wherever Pooh was. Sometimes Pooh would also stay overnight with a family of other bears, go to school, or have to do a rushed dragon-defeating mission because he had to get back for Rabbit's birthday party.
As for the Furbies, Christine had boxes of them that didn't seem at all creepy to us at the time. One day, she began a story called "My Dream." She told me that she had had a dream about Furby interactions the night before, and decided to write it down. I questioned that logic immediately. How would anyone remember an entire story without playing a role in the dream themselves? But from then on, our Furby stories were entitled, "My Dream."
At the end of the day when we listened to Harry Potter on tape, Christine and I would whip out our notepads and write during that time, until our teacher banned it. These stories were usually written on yellow legal pads, though we had other notebooks as well. Alas, my copy of "Pooh and the Dragon," the first story I ever completed, has pretty much disappeared from existence. So has "The Furby Who Came To Furbyland," about a Furby who was new in school, made a best friend, and dealt with an annoying Fur-boy in class.
We did other creative things, too. We enjoyed building a house of Pattern Blocks and calling it the Grinch house (because the Grinch and his wife lived there. Duh!), using the exact same block patterns and structures every time. We used woodchips to "draw" on the pavement at recess, imagining they were colored crayons.
Every recess, we'd sit under the fire truck-shaped jungle gym and brunch woodchips against the tire-based floor. We'd name them after events and characters on The Book of Pooh, a show that we once got up early to watch during a sleepover at her house, perhaps for inspiration. For example, in one episode Pooh is trying to open his brown front door but it won't budge because a large honeypot is in the way. Pooh looks at the camera and says, "I guess my door doesn't feel like opening today." Hence, the crayon called "I-guess-my-door-doesn't-feel-like-opening-today Brown" was born. Usually we'd announce the color weâ¯thoughtâ¯a woodchip would be before testing it out, letting it leave its slight white mark. And we'd rejoice if it turned out to be right. "Yes! Itâ¯isâ¯Tigger Orange!"
Of course, we were almost always right.
But telling stories was one of our favorite things to do. We'd go over to each other's houses, get out the notepads, and write.
A chapter per page, these stories were fairly lengthy for first-grade writers. Every so often, we'd stop to read aloud what we had written. While Christine would usually start from her new portion, I would always start the story from the beginning. My mom was a captive, yet cooperative audience.
We got to do this for homework, too. We had Homework Journals where we would have to answer questions once in a while that the teacher posed. They would write back and ask another question, and so on. When you finished one color journal, you'd move on to the next. I engaged in a silent battle with Christine over this all year. It seemed like she was always ahead of me, and I would work to write long entries in order to try and catch up.
Not all of our stories were about Pooh or Furbies. One of my most memorable stories was written in class. It was called "Christine's Handwriting," and it was all about my attempts to make my handwriting more like hers. Mine was too big, clunky, and messy, while hers was sharp, funky, and cool, or so I thought.
During our writing time, I guess I caught the eye of a classmate, who asked, "You're writing a story aboutâ¯Christine's handwriting?" Other students looked over, and Christine was mildly freaked out. As kids started going over to the teacher to tell her what I was writing about, I began to find the whole thing funny as well and wrote down everything that happened in the next few minutes.
We continued to write as our friendship went on. We wrote about Pooh defeating dragons. We used fancy chapter headings where "Chapter X" would be written in one bubble and the title would be written in an adjoining bubble. We made our stories more authentic by writing "notes" sent by characters to one another in the middle of the page. We used fancy words like "questioned" and "stated" and "inquired." We thought that fancy words meant good words. We wrote "entertainment chapters" in between regular chapters about kids' characters like Cookie Monster or the Teletubbies---one of my entertainment chapters featured Tinky Winky and Po getting lost in Teletubby land.
These qualities were what made our stories unique. If a story had any of them, you could tell it was a Morgan or Christine story.
These traditions--minus the fancy words and chapter headings--- were dead and gone by the time we started school together again. But that wasn't a bad deal.
***
Fifth grade was, hands-down, the best year of elementary school. It was also my first year of having a male teacher, who liked to make bets with usâif we won, we'd get extra recesses. Even the math projects were fun, playing probability games and building robots from graph paper. We had interesting read-alouds and plenty of time typing small essays on the computers.
And there was Christine. We still loved to write.
Christine and I spent our lunch periods telling stories about anything funny or interesting that had happened in the last 24 hours. We would ask each other, "what's the latest bus report?" Bus reports were stories of the wackos we rode the bus with...I usually took the cake for these. Or, "what's the latest computer report?" (We had a flash game site we loved and would tell each other about progress on certain games.) Or, "what's the latest dog report?" "What's the latest writing report?" And so on.
We'd also talk about our dreams. I usually had to make mine up on the spot, because they didn't compare with Christine's. We categorized our dreams because they often featured common themes or places. For Christine, there was Part 1 (guys), Part 2 (our class), or Part 3 (a house). Later on, we'd preview them when we got to school. One of us would say something like, "I have a dream I'll tell you about at lunch. It had Parts 1 and 2 in it."
We did other things, too.
We'd see what flavor drink that Christine brought in that day. She loved a brand of fruit drink called Dazzlers, which I thought were the coolest. Sometimes it would be lemonade, sometimes grape---I really wanted to try the grape. There was a floaty brown thing in one of the lemonades one day and Christine refused to drink the rest.
On pizza day, we'd collect our tinfoil snippets that the garlic bread would be wrapped in, forming them into balls and other shapes. Some of those tinfoil bits stayed in the front pocket of my lunchbox for ages.
Christine had a maze-making phase in early middle school. She'd fill whole pages with them. She'd spend free draw periods in art class making them and wowed classmates. I tried to make my own, but after working hard on one at home one day, I realized it was just one long path snaking along the page. Hers were definitely better. Sometimes she let me know it.
Look, character flaws are a thing. Everyone has them. Christine's was getting carried away with her own accomplishments sometimes. She didn't rub them in my face; she just acted satisfied. When we made fake Homework Journals for each other in first grade, she completed my "super hard" math problems with ease. I couldn't do them. When she visited our school in fourth grade, she told us all about the algebra problems she could do. Likewise, when we made mazes with chalk on the driveway, she took pleasure in finishing them while I'd take forever to finish hers, if I could. When she made me an activity book for Christmas, she included mazes and wrote on the opposite page of each: "If this is too hard for you, skip it!"
I eventually got a bit better, and we got around to making fun projects with winding paths, keys to find, and transporters where, if you landed on one, you'd get to go to a different part of the maze, but making them was short-lived.
But I can't talk about our friendship without mentioning the Microsoft Office Assistants.
We had lots of time typing up brief Africa essays in fifth grade, so we had lots of time to play with them and do other things on the computer. Office Assistants were the animated characters you found in programs such as Word or Excel that could offer assistance if you needed it. They could also perform cute animations when prompted. We didn't like Clippit the paper clip because we thought he was annoying, but he had other animated friends in Microsoft Word.
My favorite was Rocky the dog. Christine liked F1 the robot. However, we played with most of the characters. Even Clippit, sometimes---especially at home, where we didn't have the download necessary to unlock the other characters. Whenever he "misbehaved" by doing something annoying like more up the screen unprompted, we put him as far as we could in the right corner of the screen. We called it "Punishment Corner."
Sadly for us, though, we couldn't get the office assistants on our home computers. We still had Office 97, and you could only install ones that weren't Clippit by using a CD which I looked for and wide for in the shelves by the computer, but never could track down. Christine tried looking up articles online with advice, but to no avail. We spent many an hour trying to figure out the secret. Nothing ever happened.
One day, though, I was playing around, typing stories when something amazing happened: I tried selecting a new assistant just for kicks, and the computer allowed me to have Office Logo, the colorful puzzle! I had a blast discovering his animations and getting to know him. Finally, I got to have a different office assistant at home! I was thrilled to go back to school and tell Christine...who didn't believe me. Fortunately, she slept over a few weeks later and I was vindicated.
So, like we'd do with many things, we'd take to writing stories about the Microsoft icons. There was one particular story we saved just for playdates, where we'd take turns typing a sentence and then print out the new pages when we were done. Every week, we'd pass the time at meetings for worship imagining stories about them in our heads. On the walk back to school, we'd recount the adventures we imagined. I even wrote one of them down. I also remember one of Christine's tales about Mother Nature getting lost and the other characters trying to find her.
A few years later, we finally got an updated computer with a recent version of Office at home. To my delight, I was now allowed to have any assistant I wanted. I cheered in my head as I animated Rocky---in my dad's study! While some of the older assistants were no longer available to me, I couldn't have used them anyway minus the time I played with The Genius on my dad's work computer. No longer would I have to wait for school to play with them. It made them no less special, though, and we continued to write about them.
Playing with the assistants wasn't the only technological fun we had. Space Cadet Pinball was big at the time, students often opting for it at indoor recesses. Whenever an action was displayed on the screen, such as "Hyperspace Bonus!" or "Jackpot Activated!" Christine would read it aloud in a high voice. We had a good time trying to get to the millions and, after we achieved that, the four and six millions. I can still remember the goosebumps playing it at home, getting into record breaking territory as new sirens flashed and new missions were unlocked and Extra Ball after Extra Ball was earned.
Or sometimes we would play Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for PC (she would move around and I would cast spells---I wasn't very good at computer games). Those were always good times, made better by Christine doing the hard work.
But writing was always a favorite. Here are a few stories in our hall of fame:
*A story about Christine having sisters (she was an only child)
*A story about a Furby who goes to a new school, makes a friend, and gets bullied by a mean Furby named Danny
*A story about the two of us having adventures on a weeklong sleepover, including dreams of turning into dogs going to Dogland
*One of the Office Assistants (the globe, named Mother Nature) getting lost and the others having to go find her
*A story about F1 the robot being new to the Office Assistant group and everyone else trying to kick him out (we wrote this together, by taking turns writing a sentence)
*A story about talking ice cream cones playing on the tire swing at recess and blowing up classmates who wouldn't let them share it (uh...more below.)
It was super fun. But that doesn't mean that my other friends didn't leave their own legacy, which led to some of our most infamous stories.
****
During recess in third grade, Haley and I enjoyed going on the tire swing. Most of the time, the ride was very smooth while whoever was pushing pushed you around on the swing. But was a creative person like me just going to swing on the tire swing? No! For that reason, she began to refer to these pushes as "smoothies."
We'd make up smoothies as we went along. For example, she would say something like, "Here comes strawberry banana!" and then would push me, and let go so that I could ride on my own for a minute or two. The ride was...smooth. The name stuck: smoothies. Somehow, we never thought to actually make smoothie names correspond to specific ways to move the tire swing.
But when Christine came back, we developed this idea further. We continued doing smoothies after I told her all about them, but we started giving specific kinds of "pushes" to specific names. For example, one of our most basic smoothies would be called Chocolate. The pusher would move the tire swing up and down horizontally, and then let go. Another would be called Small Vanilla, where the rider would move the tire swing in circles and then let go.
The smoothies themselves had a lot of variety. We eventually added bumps (the pusher would jerk the tire swing's ropes slightly), spins (self-explanatory), and even sound effects. Many of these ideas would be combined to make a smoothie type. We typed our lists on the computer, then printed them out and brought them to recess.
We came up with so many of them that we needed to write what we called "smoothie lists." They consisted of the smoothie name followed by a description of the ride you'd get. For example, Double Chocolate was an up and down ride with both bumps and spins, and Vanilla Bean was an around and around rideâcomplete with sound effects!
At last count, Christine had 150 smoothies. She would sometimes come to school with 2 or 3 new pages. Eventually, it got so overwhelming that we had to limit it to 2-3 new pages a week. Otherwise, how would we try every smoothie?
That was every outdoor recess that year. One of us would get on the tire swing, and the pusher would give the rider their smoothie list. The rider would flip through it and choose three pushes, which the pusher would carry out. Then, the pusher would get a turn on the tire swing. It was the life. And during indoor recesses, what would we do? We'd create our own games, including a smoothie board game. We worked on it every time it rained, even though I don't think we ever played it.
I must give Christine the credit. We were still both budding writers at the time, and she was the one who came in one day and said, "Hey, I've started to write a story about the smoothies."
About the smoothies? How was that possible?â¯I pictured moving milkshake glasses with straws sticking out the top with arms, pushing each other on the tire swing. It didn't make sense to me.
Christine's vision was different. The "smoothie" characters were shaped like ice cream cones, with two semicircles for eyes, with round pupils inside, and striped cones. Another semicircle on top of the cone was its face. You could simply create a smoothie's flavor---aka naming it---by coloring in its top. Of course, a defining aspect of their character was that they loved to go on the tire swing at recess. Only instead of doing smoothies on the tire swing, they WERE smoothies.
Soon, I began to write about them as well, and we had entire stories about smoothies called Cool Chocolate, Peppermint Twist, Mint Swirl, and others. Each had their own personality. Cool Chocolate was a good speller. Raspberry was shy, timid, and almost never rode the tire swing because she didn't want to speak up for her turn. Mint Swirl hated pushing and preferred riding on the swing. Hot Fudge was mean and intimidating. In every story they would go onto the tire swing and push each other. If they got in trouble at recess (a common occurrence), they would get the tire swing taken away and would have to find a way to get it back.
The tire swing would often get taken over by a popular smoothie named Lemon Lunatic when the regular gang of smoothies was being punished. She was your cliché popular girl: she was mean to everyone, she was rich, she was good at things---even speaking French---and she was hated by all. Although most of our smoothies were stock characters, Lemon Lunatic was a staple, and an easy way to add conflict.
But come to think of it, I didn't write a whole lot of smoothie stories. I barely even wrote them whenever Christine came over. I only have one lying around today.
What we liked just as much as creating smoothie stories was creating smoothieâ¯magazines.â¯We would spend time after school creating magazines that talked about things in the smoothie world; reviews, recipes, profiles, etc. I also have a visual guide to smoothies that shows what things in the smoothie universe looked like. Things like schools (the school where our characters went called Smoothiesville Elementary), different magazines they subscribed to, stock characters, you get the drift.
We each made a couple of issues and then traded them at school. Mine was called "Smoothie Scene" and featured interviews, profiles, and games. It took about a month to make and color in. When they were finished, we'd swap our creations and read them. We didn't make too many of them because they were time consuming, but they sure were fun to make.
Not that our tire swing days were without problems. We managed to get the tire swing to ourselves much more often than we should have. We were pretty much the only fifth-graders who used it (usually); other class members had graduated to sitting and talking out on the lawn. But there was another issue that often arose:
The fourth graders.
Some of those darn fourth-graders liked the tire swing. A lot. Too much. Some days I felt it would be better if it was raining and we had indoor recess, which was just as fun: Christine and I enjoyed making up basketball games, trivia games, and board games. When it was time for recess, it could quite often be a race to which of us could get there first. And when the fourth graders were there, sometimes they'd hog the tire swing and we'd barely get a turn at all. I guess it made sense that they got more turns than we did since there were more of them. But it didn't make sense then. The tire swing wasâ¯ourâ¯Â activity.
A solution was often to form a riding line and a pushing line; depending on what you wanted to do, you would stand in the corresponding line. But this didn't always work; the fourth graders would end up doing most of the riding and pushing anyway.
I would try making attempts at getting a turn. "Hey...guys...maybe Christine and I could take a turn soon...maybe?" Sometimes that request was acknowledged. Usually it was ignored. I distinctly remember a girl named Chelsea agreeing to push me, but only twice. Then, back to the fourth graders. Hello! Christine and I always didâ¯threeâ¯pushes at a time. And we never had to wait. The other one would get on the swing, and we'd just keep going.
One day a classmate's brother was there, along with the typical gaggle of girls. I tried telling him that we wanted a turn; that we had to do our smoothies today. That was always a concern for me. Would we spend our entire recess in the riding line?
He simply laughed. "Smoothies are stupid!"
I tried to play off how cool and collected I was by brushing off his remark while showing it didn't bother me, the way that we were told to do in anti-bullying assemblies. "Wow! Did you hear that, Christine? I have a stupid smoothie list!" I said, as I spun round and round after we finally did get a turn. My voice oozed with fake pride, pretending that the word "stupid" was a compliment.
(Years later, this haunted me. It was probablyâ¯notâ¯the best way to brush off a rude remark, and it only made me come across as, well, stupid. Oh well. He didn't say anything back. I guess it worked to some weird extent. Maybe because he thought I was insane.)
The fourth graders were a constant problem, but they did provide us with one solution: make them the villains in our smoothie stories. The main characters were in fifth grade, like us. But who to use for the bad guys? After all, stories had to have bad guys! What about...the real life equivalents of our main characters? Genius.
You know that saying that goes, "Be careful how you treat a writer; they may put you in a book and kill you"? Something along those lines. Well, the same was true for me. Turns out I had a pretty sadistic sense of revenge when I was ten.
In my first smoothie story, the main characters---a group of fifth-graders---wanted to get rid of the annoying fourth graders who wouldn't give them a turn. So what do they do? Plant a bomb by the tire swing! Yep, those smoothies shattered right into little pieces during recess time. Their teacher finds them, punishes them by taking away the tire swing (a fate much worse than prison!), and makes them attend a whole-school funeral the following week.
Okay, maybe I didn't want them dead. In fact, I owe a lot to those hoggy fourth-graders who inspired my writing. They didn't turn out to be so terrible after all. And Christine and I got the tire swing to ourselves much more often than we should have, considering all the kids at recess.
Fifth grade was full of tire swing fun. It made going to schoolâ¯â¯worth it.
But as soon as we got into middle school, that changed. Christine, often in a hurry to grow up, wanted nothing more to do with them after that year. We were sitting out on the playground one day (we still had recess breaks) sometime in seventh grade, when my nostalgic self looked at the tire swing.
"Maybe we could try a together push sometime, just for fun," I suggested. A together push was what happened when we were done doing smoothies, in the last 5-10 minutes of recess. We'd get on the tire swing together and push ourselves that way until recess was over.
"No, we're too old for that," she said.
"Yeah. You're right," I agreed, albeit reluctantly. Looking back at the tire swing, I knew that that part of childhood was unfortunately gone.
Isn't it funny how you can love something so much and then it's not part of your life anymore? One afternoon in June of 2005, Christine and I were doing smoothies. Then the whistle blew, as always, we left the tire swing, as always, and just never got back on. Whenever we got off for the day, I would give the tire swing one last big push and casually glance back at it as we walked inside---letting the credits roll, as it were. Perhaps I was thinking that we'd just do it again next year as I walked away from that last recess, watching the tire swing go back and forth, but we didn't.
Sometimes, though, I still long for simpler days of recess and tire swing smoothies. That feeling of freedom as you sat on the swing, hair blowing on the wind, feeling generally happy with the state of how life was going.
Lucky for us, writing serves as an excellent time capsule. We can look back at old diaries, writers' notebooks from English class, creative stories and projects, and see what we wrote about; sometimes even remembering where we were and what we were doing at the time we wrote them. When I look at my original smoothie story, I remember how that journal sat in our minivan years ago, sitting and waiting for me to pick it up whenever we went for a drive. I still remember one particular day in rainy weather, stopping at a Shell station, and writing the first few pages.
These smoothies were only one instance where childhood experiences would inspire me, and they'd even appear later in life as I said above. Even then, I'm still glad that my old smoothie stuff is around for a look back at the old days. And now, you can see it too.
Additional author's note March 2020: I am currently working on a different book inspired by the events of this chapter about a group of students who get together and share their lives over the tire swing. Of all the things that I've dreamed up, it seems amazing to me that something I *actually* ended up writing about was the simple act of swinging at recess.