My Paean to Mrs. Rasmussen.

Mrs. Rasmussen was my seventh-grade English teacher who taught me some essentials of writing.

She had short, blond hair and wore white, button-down shirts and pretty, colorfully patterned skirts. She was a graduate of Cornell University, which seemed like a special place of learning to me because my brother was planning on attending Cornell starting that coming fall.

Mrs. Rasmussen had us write one theme a week. No other teacher did that. Just being in her class felt special. Without thinking about it, I inculcated the first and most important lesson about writing. If you want to write, write often. Write every day, if possible.

She had us fold our theme papers in half along the vertical axis so that when we handed them in they appeared tall and skinny with our name, class period and Mrs. Rasmussen's name in the upper-right hand corner. This folding thing was obviously superficial, but I remember thinking it was important. I remember being impressed with it. Did she say that this was the way students folded their papers at Cornell University? I have a vague recollection of that. Perhaps I made it up. To this day I don't know for sure.

I became very caught up with how foreign yet special the writing and the folding felt, and somehow that got involved with a fantasy I had that in secret Mrs. Rasmussen was teaching our seventh-grade English class as a university class that only we were being allowed to take. There's a lesson there: Always go into a writing session, if possible, feeling that what you're doing is very special. This increases the likelihood that what you'll wind up with will also be very special. One can certainly hope for that outcome. It's good to hope. In a way, Mrs. Rasmussen taught me that, too, that it's good to hope.

One day Mrs. Rasmussen taught us how to write a description. She had us make a list of four or five things, bullet points that we wanted to include in the description. Then she wrote out in her beautiful handwriting on the blackboard (it was a blackboard in those day) the description based on the bullet points. She taught me this programmatic approach to creativity: First come up with the bullet points. Then turn them into nicely crafted sentences. That was the technique I used when composing the description of Mrs. Rasmussen in the first paragraph.

Today as I remember Mrs. Rasmussen I also remember the beginnings of my desire to be a writer. All I knew for sure at the time was that when I was writing for Mrs. Rasmussen it felt as special as the way I folded my papers. No wonder my memory of her is so special to me now.