Neon Green Chuck Taylors

One of the classes eating up my time this semester is Creative Writing. It's actually pretty cake, it's just intro and is kind of a fun nothing class. For this class I have to keep a "writing journal" - different from my regular journal, or an online journal (which is also known as a blog) - and write in it at least 10 minutes a day. This is probably the most helpful thing the class is doing for me because it's forcing me to get into the habit of writing regularly again. However, because I haven't really been writing, I sometime have a hard time coming up with something to write about. To cure this malady, I went through my old writing journals (they seem pretty standard in Creative writing classes) for inspiration in the form of old prompts/exercises/formulas etc. Among a lot of drivel and some useful bits I found an poem, pasted in, that Sam Clarke wrote about me.

Sam was a kid I met at Writers@Work- a week long writing workshop thing held in the summer. They had a program for regular adult writers and also one for high school students. I went to it at least two summers, as did Sam. The poem he wrote about me was nothing like you would expect (certainly not a love poem) - it was about my hand. We had done a workshop earlier that day in which we were supposed to write about someone's hands in this certain formulaic way. He hadn't written his poem. We were hanging out later that day and I was giving him crap for not writing when that was the point of all of us being there. He said that he couldn't think of a hand to write about. I offered him mine, left it on his ankle and moved on to another conversation.

The poem he wrote (I don't have it with me as I'm writing this) was fairly decent. I was super flattered and amused by it. I asked him for a copy the next year and it still makes me smile when I read it.

Every now and then I wonder what happened to Sam. I don't honestly remember much about him. He was kind of a skinny, pale kid with dark hair. He wore chuck taylor high tops that were bright green. Not kelly green, or grass green, but bright, neon, highlighter green. They looked like they should glow in the dark (they didn't, I asked him). He played the clarinet, I think.

Of all the people I met at W@W, Sam is pretty much the only person I really remember. Maybe it's just because he wrote a poem about me. I recall we got along well though, and I like to think that he was a brief friend from that little sliver of my life. I wonder if I were to track him down if he would remember me at all.

It's kind of funny how some people stick with you. Even if you just knew them for a week or so.