Up in Smoke

In tenth grade, 1972, my English teacher gave us a simple assignment. We were to write in a journal anything we wanted and turn the journal in to her once a week.

At the time I had been living in a small Northern Vermont town for one year after moving from a large suburban town in New Jersey. I was able to shed tight bell bottoms and make-up for flannel shirts, loose jeans, a heavy green hooded parka with lined snow mobile books while keeping my teenage desire to fit in somewhere. In the towns eyes, I was part of the school of teenage fish with three girls who moved from Long Island around the same time. The small group of hippies seemed to gravitate towards us with our long dark wavy hair so my journal was filled with all the ways I tried to fit in with the hippies. Mostly, I felt comfortable with my friendship with the Long Island girls. Everything else was experimental. The English teacher got to read about my experiments. She wrote positive comments in red ink and talked to my parents who then went into my room and read my journal.

I only wanted my English teacher to read my journal that had many pages describing the crimes of the 1972 group of teens so strongly affected by the turmoil of the 1960s.

Furious, I took a match and lit the notebook on fire. In the dry winter heat, the flames became large enough for me to run to the bathroom and plunge the burning torch into the toilet. There were no smoke alarms at the time but my parents, younger sister, brother and St. Bernard named Fred must have smelled the burning porcelain. We all stood silently in the upstairs bathroom and watched to notebook go up in smoke.