The Gift Of Myself
Stories
Shining Moments
Visions Of The Holy In Ordinary Lives
Jim Eaton
We know how changed we are when someone embraces the child within us. In 1965, I was a fourteen-year-old geek in the ninth grade at Bloomfield Junior High School on Quarton Road. My family had moved to Michigan a couple of years before and I'd been sick for a year, so I hadn't really found a place or a circle of friends. My English teacher was Mrs. Sonneborne, a towering cyclone of energy five feet tall, who invariably wore spiky high heels. Her room was arranged with the desks in a circle and she would walk around and around as she read to us from Shakespeare. This was during Beatlemania and the boys had been growing out their hair since seventh grade; and the girls all had long hair, too. Mrs. Sonneborne insisted on being able to look people in the eye, and when your bangs were too long, she would pick up a hair clip as she went by her desk, and on her next circuit she would deftly pin up the offending hair. Being "pinned" once was more than enough to get her point.
One day, Mrs. Sonneborne assigned everyone to rewrite a folk tale. I'd been reading a lot of drama, so I decided to write a play. It was five pages long, typed in dialogue format, and when I showed it to Mrs. Sonneborne, she had two other kids in the class act it out. It was -- and is! -- a heady feeling to watch someone speak lines you've written. After class, Mrs. Sonneborne kept me for a moment and said something I've never forgotten. "Jim, I didn't know what you were until today. Now I know; you're a writer." And I was. I was still a geek, but I wasn't just a geek, I was a writer. I wrote two more plays for Mrs. Sonneborne, and others after that. A few years later, it occurred to me that writing a worship service was a lot like writing plays, and here I am, still at it. Mrs. Sonneborne was right: I'm a writer, and she saw it. She gave it to me. She surprised me with the gift of myself.
We know how changed we are when someone embraces the child within us. In 1965, I was a fourteen-year-old geek in the ninth grade at Bloomfield Junior High School on Quarton Road. My family had moved to Michigan a couple of years before and I'd been sick for a year, so I hadn't really found a place or a circle of friends. My English teacher was Mrs. Sonneborne, a towering cyclone of energy five feet tall, who invariably wore spiky high heels. Her room was arranged with the desks in a circle and she would walk around and around as she read to us from Shakespeare. This was during Beatlemania and the boys had been growing out their hair since seventh grade; and the girls all had long hair, too. Mrs. Sonneborne insisted on being able to look people in the eye, and when your bangs were too long, she would pick up a hair clip as she went by her desk, and on her next circuit she would deftly pin up the offending hair. Being "pinned" once was more than enough to get her point.
One day, Mrs. Sonneborne assigned everyone to rewrite a folk tale. I'd been reading a lot of drama, so I decided to write a play. It was five pages long, typed in dialogue format, and when I showed it to Mrs. Sonneborne, she had two other kids in the class act it out. It was -- and is! -- a heady feeling to watch someone speak lines you've written. After class, Mrs. Sonneborne kept me for a moment and said something I've never forgotten. "Jim, I didn't know what you were until today. Now I know; you're a writer." And I was. I was still a geek, but I wasn't just a geek, I was a writer. I wrote two more plays for Mrs. Sonneborne, and others after that. A few years later, it occurred to me that writing a worship service was a lot like writing plays, and here I am, still at it. Mrs. Sonneborne was right: I'm a writer, and she saw it. She gave it to me. She surprised me with the gift of myself.
