He says he would like to work with computers
A kindergarten inventory my mom filled out in 1993, before I started school. At the bottom, in her handwriting, is a sentence that quietly predicted my whole life.
There is a loose paper in my old box that I cannot stop thinking about. It has no date on it, but it is almost certainly from right before kindergarten. It is a parent inventory, the kind a teacher sends home so she can get to know your kid before the year starts. Mine was signed by Mrs. McCauley and Mrs. Patton, who I am now sure were my kindergarten teachers, and it asks parents to return it at the open house on “Tuesday, August 31.” The math on that lands it in 1993, when I was five.
My mom filled it out, and it is a perfect little snapshot of me at that age:
- Born March 30, 1988. Right-handed.
- The baby of a family of four: my mom, my dad, my brother (eight and three-quarters at the time), and me.
- On TV I liked Gumby, on channel 9, and “movie tapes.”
- Our cat was Jupiter, a white cat with black spots. She has her own story, for another day.
- Places I had already been: a farm, a zoo, a ball game, another city, a park, a library, a movie, the Arch, a restaurant, an amusement park, the art museum. Not yet: a circus, or camping.
- Trips I had taken: a boat (a float trip), a car, a bus. Never a train or a plane.
- The development checklists are almost all “yes,” with a couple of very honest exceptions. I could not quite catch a ball or tie my shoes yet, and next to “takes care of own belongings” and “puts things away when finished,” my mom circled, fairly, “sometimes.”
And then, at the very end, there is a box that reads, “I would like for you to know the following about my child.” Here is what my mom wrote:
“Is the baby of the family. Is not a real ruff-tuff boy. Is well behaved. He says he would like to work with computers in school.”
I have read that last line about forty times now. This was 1993, before kindergarten. There were no computers in my life back then, not really, not at home and not anywhere I can remember. And yet somehow five-year-old me had told my mom, clearly enough that she wrote it down on a school form, that I wanted to work with computers.
Everything else on this whole site, the websites, the apps, the career, all of it is, in a way, that one sentence slowly coming true. A little premonition, filed away in a kindergarten folder for thirty years, until I finally went looking.