For my composition pedagogy class, I had to visit a downtown park very near the university and write about it. The teacher gave no other criteria because the point of the assignment was to see how personality affects writing style. I liked what I came up with, so I thought I'd post it here. Keep in mind this was the product of about an hour with very little editing, not my usual turn-in-able academic writing.
Kelly Elmore
Composition Pedagogy
Park Assignment
I follow the stream of students moving away from campus. Our line cuts through the park on the diagonal. We walk like a line of ants, looking neither right nor left but only forward to our destination or down at our moving feet. This pathway might as well be walled in with concrete, windowless, with thick insulation to keep out sound. It’s as if the campus moves outward with the students, passing through the surrounding city, borders lying near to each other, but never touching.
Where the diagonal path crosses the circle that rings the park, I turn right, away from the students and into the park. Suddenly, when I cross through the wall that separates campus and city, I am conspicuous. I suddenly realize how white and suburban I am. I imagine that my education, which, in this moment, seems ridiculously prolonged, is visible all over me, Greek rhetoric and Middle English hanging around my neck like gaudy costume jewelry.
As I walk along the loop, people turn to look at me and then return to what they were doing before I walked by.
A man sleeps on the grass in the field enclosed by the loop. He has removed his boots, and I can see his large brown feet.
A woman, pushing a baby girl in a stroller, has stopped to talk to a group. She stands with her hands on her hips, talking loudly, pointing at the listening people with her finger. The child doesn’t look up from
the stroller but plays with her fingers.
A group of old men play cards at a table. They laugh loudly, while one of them deals, and a very fat man, leaning back in his chair, rests his cards on his belly.
A young man asks me about my shoes. He laughs at them in a friendly way and wants to know where I got them.
I wish that I could disguise myself and move among these people like a spy. I’d like to sit down on a bench and hear what the woman is telling her group. I’d like to lean in over the shoulder of the fat man and find out what game the old men are playing and hear the joke they laugh at. I’d like to be able to talk like them and look like them and feel invisible among them.
I finish the loop and fall in with the stream of students walking back toward the university. Suddenly, when I cross back into the flow of moving campus, I can’t feel the color of my skin or the place where I live.
My education seems to shrink back to a normal size and fit down inside of me again, hidden. I am camouflaged, invisible in front of the background that looks and sounds and moves just like me.
9/28/10
