Beginners Have It All

Beginners Have It All

**An excerpt from my personal journal, recorded January 9, 2019 at 8:46 p.m.**

After much delay, I return to this notebook as a measure of protection for both myself and my family.

Local, state, and federal authorities could swoop in on this humble home any minute now.

My wife, you see, a teacher, read aloud some page-long prose written by a selection of her third-grade students earlier this day. After listening to her carry on for some time, I soon concluded that the unrestrained, sometimes incoherent ramblings of these students are quantifiably CRIMINAL, subject to scrutiny by the country's highest courts.

Criminal, in the palpable lack of inhibition with which each author followed the instructor's directives.

Criminal, in the syntax so innocent of structure, style, and vocabulary that it renders the work of masters in all three somehow less compelling.

Criminal, for if one could—inconceivably, impossibly—rank each prose piece from first to last, even the most underdeveloped author, the student *least* predisposed to achieving spectacular feats of rich and rewarding penmanship, still has all the scattered nuance—all the ephemeral and immaterial trappings—of a sound writer in the making.

Despite my furious scribblings, my wife the teacher quickly reminds me that not all seeds germinate.

Still, I do believe somebody should call the police.

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