Ode To My Parents

This post was going to be short. Then it got long. And now I know it's an ode to my parents --

When I was in school, one of the traditions I always looked forward to was going to the office supply store to get new school supplies with my parents.

It moved me that they always allowed me to choose pretty things. Not the plain white erasers, but the colorful, scented ones. Not the yellow pencils, but pink ones, with my name stenciled on them in gold letters. The notebooks with the thick, creamy paper. The Hello Kitty mini stapler I could clip to my backpack.

It seemed to me, every year, that the list of supplies was endless. There were even these double-sided colored pencils in El Salvador that we bought every year. One side was red, the other side was blue. Those pencils came in really handy when I was making study materials like vocabulary lists, notecards, and outlines.

My mother made me take calligraphy lessons as a young child because she wanted me to have beautiful handwriting (print AND script). She taught me so many wonderful things. She taught me to date every notebook page in the upper right corner, to put the title flush against the left margin, and to underline the title in red. She taught me to skip lines in order to make the text look aesthetically pleasing, but also not to create unnecessary gaps on the page. She taught me to use rulers and pencils to draw erasable, "invisible" margins so as to create vocabulary-definition lists that were aligned to perfection.

By the upper elementary grades, I was using rulers to measure the width of my notebook paper and I was using that number to mathematically create perfectly distributed columns (with the alacrity of a scientist building rockets for NASA). My teachers were holding up my notebooks in class and telling my peers — now, that's what a notebook should look like! And I always blushed in the front row.

I absolutely loved filling up my notebooks. I loved copying things from the chalkboard. This peculiarity of mine made my classmates think I was downright insane. We had a Latin American History teacher who would come to school at five in the morning every day and he would write out entire lessons on the four chalkboards in the room. We had to copy every word down. And that was our Latin American History class. Endless note-taking. Almost everyone hated that class. Of course, I didn't.

My mother made me love being organized. She made me love making things look beautiful. She made me take pride in my work. When I handed in my homework, I was proud to turn it in. If my papers got wet, or excessively wrinkled, tough fucking shit, I knew had to do it again, because there was no way I was going to hand my teachers some crumpled up, ugly-looking pages. That was simply out of the question! And I didn't mind doing things over.

I had one friend who had the most beautiful handwriting the world has ever seen. I was very jealous of her lovely script. It was the good kind of jealousy. That's something else that my mother taught me. She said to me, "There will always be someone better than you, but that will never diminish your excellence. Let the better people inspire you, always." And they always have. My friends are always better people than me, and I never stop learning.

This post was not supposed to turn into a novel. But I was organizing my desk tonight, and I found myself thinking, Mom, Dad, you don't hear from me every day, but I think of you when I do simple things, like sharpen my floral pencils, or put my new pens into a cup.

Dad, thanks for all your sacrifice, because seriously, your kid didn't need a Hello Kitty stapler that clips onto a backpack, but you got that stuff anyway. Mom, thanks for your invaluable lessons. And thank you both for teaching me how to take pleasure and feel joy in what I do. All of it!

I think this is the most important thing for kids to learn these days. How take pleasure in what they have to do. How to feel joy. If I could teach that with half the skill my parents did, I would.

Here I am tonight. 39 years old, and Mom, Dad, I find you, still, in the most ordinary things. Love you to infinity.

I think the favorite thing on my desk this fall is the Seriously? post-its. I mean, seriously? What could possibly be a better post-it for work?