On The Adventure Of Dino And Color-Shifting

Back in the fifth grade, I wrote my first story. It was about a friendly dinosaur named Dino that travelled around the world making friends with other dinosaurs. I decided to make it an expository tale about the way people (or great-big lizards) interacted with each other. Our teacher even provided the class with a blank hardbound book so we could illustrate our stories. I went at it with all the finesse my untrained 11-year-old hand could offer. Dino, a reasonable facsimile of a T-Rex, met many other reasonable facsimiles of dinosaur-like-people along his journeys, and went from red to blue to green from page to page. I can’t remember if that was a plot element, or if a sudden disinterest in dulled down crayons spurred my decision. Maybe a little bit of both. In the end, he had done a lot of cool stuff and seen a lot of neat things, but he wasn’t much different than he was when he started. I finished the book, but felt like I should have kept going, and wasn’t sure why.

At any rate, I liked what I had made, but even in a world of lunchroom drama and playground fantasies, I realized that my story could have been a lot better. My oversized coke-bottle glasses didn’t blind me from knowing that I still had room to grow (even if they did make me hide my school yearbooks). Since writing that story, I’ve done a lot of growing. I’ve written short stories that could fill those hardbound pages with words instead of doodles, and essays that are so literary, even I shouldn’t be able to understand them, but after I’ve printed out the pages, I still look back and think I could have gone farther. And by knowing that, I push harder every time. Every now and then, it shows.

I’m about to graduate from college now, and still don’t know what Dino should have learned all those years ago. Maybe his color-shifting meant he changed himself to fit in with the new people he met. The white background could have been symbolic of the fact that people are the only thing colorful in a white-washed world, or that there is potential in all things. Or maybe lazy story telling leads to plot holes and confused readers. Whatever the case, my first story still leaves me wondering. And to me, that’s the best thing that can happen when you’ve finished turning the pages.