CarrollBlog

In school I was always terrible in math. If I passed I was thrilled, but I usually didn't pass and had to repeat or go to summer school. In tenth grade, my parents shipped me off to a difficult private boarding school because I was doing so poorly in public school. It was a disaster. Not only did I flunk math but other classes as well. Summer school loomed. And not only that, but summer school there which meant I would have to live on campus. I didn't like school but my best subject was English, so I decided that since I had to be there anyway, I might as well take a creative writing course. It was taught by a man who had published a couple of stories in THE NEW YORKER years before, so he was considered the school's writer in residence. I liked him as a man but as a teacher he was boring. After the class had been in session for a couple of weeks, he came in one morning and said today we're going to do something different; I'm going to read you a story. I don't know if we groaned but we probably did. It was summer. It was hot. There were a million other things we would rather have been doing. Most of us read only for school and then only because we were forced to.

It was a story by Thomas Wolfe entitled "Circus at Dawn." It's about two little boys who live in rural North Carolina. The high point of every year was when the circus came to town for a few days. The story is essentially a description of the boys sneaking out of the house very early one summer morning to watch the circus train arrive at the station, unload, and then set up. The kids watch as exotic animals are led out of their boxcars, performers appear, the workmen start to work putting things up. Of course the boys are goggle eyed at everything. It was a pretty interesting story and while listening to the teacher read, I gazed out the window at the summer sky. Towards the end when the tent has been erected and most of the work is done, the circus people sit down together to eat. Wolfe describes in glorious detail the meal they were served. Stacks of pancakes and waffles with butter and maple syrup, hot smoking canisters of coffee, fried eggs, steaks and hamburgers hot off the grill, etcetera. He went on and on describing breakfast. Caught up in those delicious sentences, I was right at the table, smelling, tasting, eating it. The teacher stopped to take a breath. I heard the slightest "plip" sound somewhere nearby. Slowly looking down at my brown wood desk, I saw a shiny spot. Saliva. I had drooled. I was so affected by Wolfe's descriptions of food that I had unconsciously drooled. I stared at that shiny drop on my desk and to this day I remember very clearly the awe I felt. *Then.* That's when I knew I wanted to write. If something I wrote could have that effect on someone fifty years after I had written it, then that's what I wanted to do.