Writing an Essay With a Wrecking Ball

Last Friday I received my first assignment from my writing class. We were given a choice of readings concerning literacy and its meaning to the author: Sherman Alexie's The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me, Frederick Douglass' Learning to Read and Write, and Joyce Carol Oats' District School #7, Niagara County, New York. I was excited as I opened my textbook, reviewed the points of critical reading, then read each essay. We were to choose one of the readings as an example to follow, and guess which of the authors happens to be my favorite? None other than the master, or should I say mistress? Joyce Carol Oates. I was the only one in class, other than the professor, who knew who she was.

Ms. Oates wrote a story about a one room schoolhouse, a school she called a link to the 'mythopoetic American frontier past', whose books affected her at an early age. She perceived the literature of Poe, Hawthorne, and others, to be 'real' as compared to the wild characters and stories in children's books, and so began her journey into reading and literacy.

At first I was unsure of this choice. An essay, using Oates as an example, on buildings and how they affected or symbolized my education? I didn't immediately see how I could use my favorite writer as a guide on my first real college assignment. But what did she say? The schoolhouse was demolished? Then I remembered! My compulsory attendance within the joint wasn't marked only by the day the school partly burned to the ground.

Far across the campus, to the south, stood an old and stately building I felt was the icon of a 'real' high school. Isolated from us by a barrier of chain link fences and condemned by the Fire Marshal, it kept its dignity, even as a crane swinging a wrecking ball pounded at it with dumb mechanical determination. That was the only school to excite me, and the only one I was forbidden to enter. The night, though, brought opportunities to one who dared trespass against powers and principalities to see and experience the myth before it passed into oblivion.