About Robots

Michael McGrorty writes ”
Last week I was working the reference desk on a rainy night when the traffic was so slow that I actually had a few moments to think. Being the type who likes to keep busy, I decided to take a tour of the lost-and-found drawer; we’d had a call earlier from somebody looking for a wallet, and it raised my interest in that treasure-trove of cast-offs.

If you’ve worked in a library any length of time you know that just about anything gets left behind, particularly by children. I ignored the clothing department and got to work on the books, dividing them into stacks according to whether I could identify an owner or no. There were a few textbooks to return to the junior high, and quite a few school binders. Inside one of them was a steno pad on which was written, in a kid’s printing, this little gem, which I leave unedited:

Bionical Robots
by Joshua

Long ago on a far away land in the jungle there was a creative man. One day he saw pepol landing in the jungle. There was a war. Jet-to-jet boat-to-boat. A rocket came tord a jet. Boom pieces came dropping down. By the time the war was over the man thot I can make something I never made. So he started bilding piece by piece. He was finished in two days. He turned on the switch. The robot turned on with a bright light. When the light was gon the robot was gon. This was good. The man new it will bring danger. He got very greedy. He made more. All because he

Thus the story ends. I would take the author to be a fairly bright little boy with an imagination that outraces his ability to compose sentences. Don’t ask me how I know this, but I am sure his speech is a fair replication of his writing style. I would also wager that he can go on talking in the same manner for as long as anybody is willing to listen to him.

I think I know the type pretty well. When the boy finally gets his pen in sync with the speed of his mind, he will discover that he can actually put thoughts down in good order. Without a doubt he will do a good deal of reading; this will both inspire and depress him, the latter when he realizes how poor his own work is in comparison to the authors he loves and admires. He will experiment and struggle and very often hate his own writing. He will abandon the craft but return to it again and again, not because he wants to, and certainly not because so many people have told him he is a writer, nor in spite of the ones who have told him he is not (for neither of them know) but because he can’t help doing it: can’t stop returning to the pad and paper like a thirsty man to a well and its dipper, and for the same reason.

One day, most likely from the despair of some signal failure, he will quit trying to be some other writer or combination of them. At the bottom of an emotional cycle he will sit down and commence medicating himself with his pen, and the work will be, for the first time, genuine, which is to say, genuinely his own. After that he will begin to be a good writer, even if nobody else thinks so, and even if they do. And he will know it because it will feel different when he is done: he will sense not so much his cleverness or pride in crafting but a completeness, as when a man conveys entirely some serious matter that even he has not known has been on his mind.

When that happens, when the moment comes when he can open himself up completely in writing, then the promise which emerged when his first imaginings came to rest on paper will have reached fruition: the well will flow from within him, and there will be no difference, no boundary between himself and his work.

Maybe the boy will try to make a living of writing; better for him to let the writing go where it will. Don’t ask me how I know that, either.

Wherever you sleep tonight, Joshua, I hope you dream of robots and finish your story before morning comes to break the spell.

Michael McGrorty
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