Free Knots in My Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli Page B

reason I would not admit this to myself. Instead of saying, Hey, that was good, that was fun, I think I’ll read another—I would dump my baseball glove into my bike basket and head out the path to the Little League field, and months would go by before I picked up a book again. Reading a book was for times when I was totally bored and lacking anything else to do.
    And what about words, which, packed together, made up a book as cells made up my body? I liked them. Yet this was such a naturally occurring, unachieved sort of thing that if someone had asked me in those days, “Do you like words?” I probably would have shrugged and blithely answered, “No.”
    Still, whether I knew it or not, words were claiming me. When I visited Hartenstine Printing, where my father worked as a typesetter, I saw words being created letter by letter, one thin slug of lead at a time.
    Once, in a comic book, someone with a bad heart was described as having a bum ticker. That tickled me to no end. I kept whispering “bum ticker” to myself for days.
    Except for the Heap, my favorite comic book characters were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I liked them as much for their words as their ways. For me, the highlight of a scene was not what happened, but what Bugs or Daffy said about what happened. This is probablywhy Mickey Mouse never much appealed to me. His speech was too bland for my taste.
    When I was eleven or twelve, my mother and I laughed for months over a corny old vaudeville joke that I kept asking her to repeat. She gave the joke a local twist. It went like this:
    Man goes to the beach for a vacation. Goes into the water. When he comes out, he sees a lady sitting next to his blanket.
    He says, “Hi, I’m a little stiff from swimming.”
    She says, “Hello, I’m a secretary from Norristown.”
    (I’m laughing again.)
    Occasionally I had to look up a word in the dictionary. Sometimes my eye would stray to the surrounding words. Invariably it stopped at an interesting one, and I read the definition. In one such instance I discovered that I was a gossoon. I clearly remember two feelings attached to these moments: (1) surprise that a dictionary could be so interesting, and (2) a notion to sit down and look through more pages. I never did.
    And then of course there was my success in spelling.
    All of these items were indicators of an early leaning toward language, but I failed to see them as such. The tickle of a rabbit’s wit, the rattle of alphabet in a compositor’s drawer—they simply took their place among the Popsicles and penknives and bike tires of my days.
    With one exception.
    In sixth grade our teacher assigned us a project: Make a scrapbook of Mexico. I found pictures of Mexico in
National Geographic
and other magazines and pasted them in my scrapbook, for which my father made a professional-looking cover at the print shop. Then I did something extra. It wasn’t part of the assignment. I just did it.
    I wrote a poem.
    Three stanzas about Mexico, ending with a touristy come-on: “Now, isn’t that where you would like to be?” I wrote it in pencil, longhand, my best penmanship, on a piece of lined classroom paper. I pasted it neatly on the last page of my scrapbook and turned in my project.
    Several days later my mother walked the three blocks to my school. She met with my teacher, who told her she did not believe that my poem about Mexico was my own work. She thought I copied it from a book. (Hah! If she only knew how few books I read, and never one with poetry.) I was suspected of plagiarism.
    I don’t know what my mother said to her, but by the time she walked out I was in the clear, legally at least. Five years would pass before I wrote another poem.

Staying in the Lines
    I was neat.
    How neat was I? Say I had to cut a rectangle out of a piece of paper. First I would measure a perfect shape with my ruler, then draw it with a sharp pencil. Then with my scissors I would cut it out. But not
just
cut it out. I would cut