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Memories and Memoirs Coordinated Studies
Short Personal Narrative Student Sample #1
JC Clapp & Melissa Grinley, North Seattle Community College
Winter 2010
STUDENT SAMPLE:
This should give you and idea of what we’re looking for. Please do not use ideas, form, or other content that you read here. Come
up with your own ideas. This is for sample purposes, only! (Yes, this was written by an actual student from one of our previous
classes, and yes, we obtained this student’s permission to use his/her paper as a sample.)
At The End
The morning of 9/11, I woke my father to tell him planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. It was 8:40 am, and he
wouldn't have been up for hours if I hadn't woken him. In the aftermath, when life seemed so fragile, and death imminent, my father
began attending a small Pentecostal church, where people spoke in tongues and rolled on the floor in the throes of their faith. That was
when the father of my past turned into the father of my future.
The father from my childhood was a liberal man, concerned about the environment and human rights issues. He had been
vaguely religious when I was young, but I didn’t much recall any of that. This was a different father, the one I saw now. He began to
speak of God a lot, about Spiritual Warfare, about how the Holy Spirit could affect things. When my father developed a stye at the rim
of his eye, it was because Satan was trying to stop him from doing good.
When my sister had gotten pregnant outside of wedlock, he had refused to speak to her for weeks. This did not precipitate me
wanting to tell my father I was gay. In a few short months, I was moving to Seattle with my partner April, but as the weeks in Texas
became fewer and fewer, I kept putting off the day I would tell him. I had told the rest of my family, and they were wonderfully
supportive, but I didn’t want the kind of anger he had directed at my sister to fall on me, and so I did not tell him.
April and I moved away, and I still had not told him. It was my mom who finally told him, during an argument.
“Marcie’s gay, you know,” she said. My mother told me later he had not said anything, had just looked at her with a
disgusted face, and walked out of the house, slamming the door. He did not speak to me for months.
Once he began to speak to me again, he was always careful to navigate around my blasphemous lifestyle, to kinder, gentler
issues, such as my unrealized spiritual potential.
“I was watching that move, Constantine, and wow, that was really amazing. I mean, I know it is supposed to be fiction,” my
father said, of the movie based on a comic book, “but it really is so close to how the world really is.”
I was home visiting at Christmas, staying at my mother’s house. I leaned against the warped counter in the kitchen, nodding
politely and trying to keep my face neutral, while thinking Holy shit, he’s lost his mind!
“You know, I’ve always felt you have this spiritual gift, like the girl in that movie. Maybe not that you can see demons or
angels like her, but something really special. Like maybe you’re a healer. I can’t wait until it manifests.”
I respond in muffled “ahhs” and “hmms” as he continues on, my head large and hot with unshed tears; of laughter or despair,
I’m not sure. Possibly both.
I flew back to Texas for my youngest sister Maria’s high school graduation. At the graduation, my father brought a woman
with him, Susan, a friend of his from church. He had not told anyone he would be bringing her, and it was a very small graduation, so
we were all horribly uncomfortable. I had never met Susan, although my sisters had met her once or twice. She was quiet, and sullen
looking. When I tried to make conversation, she would give me monosyllabic answers, or a vague, tiny smile.
“I think,” Erin whispered, as we picked at the Little Smokies and fruit plates at the reception, “they might be dating.”
A day before I was to return to Seattle, my father wanted to take me out to breakfast. He let me choose the place, and I
decided on Busy B’s Bakery, a mom-and-pop place on the 377 traffic circle. They had kolaches filled with fruit and cream cheese, and
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rolls with little sausages in them, and great cinnamon rolls. It was warm already, even though it was only 8 am, and there was a fleet
of restored hotrods outside, all in a line, bright turquoise and red and yellow punctuated by fins and pristine chrome. We sat at a tiny,
battered Formica table looking at them through the glass wall. I had two cherry kolaches and a sausage roll; my father had a cinnamon
roll. We both had chocolate milk.
“Susan was going to come, but she had a church thing at the last minute,” my father said.
“Okay,” I said, through a mouthful of salty sausage and fluffy roll. It was hot, and I was trying not to burn my mouth. I didn’t
know why she would have come, anyways.
“Susan has a paper route, too, and we have breakfast in the mornings after we’re done.” I nodded, enjoying the tangy-sweet
of the cherries, the salty-crunch of the streusel.
“We were at her house, praying the other day, and, and well, God spoke to me, and told me she was pregnant.”
I stopped chewing, the half-chewed bite of kolache, slimy and sour against my tongue.
“And I looked at her,” he continued, “and I said ‘did you hear that?’ And she said yes,
she had. So…so,” he struggled to get the words out, as if her were conveying such wonderful news it was hard to put into speech.
“We’re going to have a baby.”
I forced myself to swallow.
“Wow,” I said. I said wow several times. But the surprises kept coming.
“I would like to have your blessing, for Susan and I to get married. It’s really important to me that you girls are okay with
this.”
Blessing? I hadn’t known until mere moments ago that he was even really dating this woman. I had met her only twice, both
within the last three days. And who did he think he was, anyways? He’d cut Erin off for weeks by doing exactly what he had gone
and done now. How could I give him a blessing?
He looked at me earnestly, his hazel eyes red-rimmed, flashy with tears of emotion, pinched at the edges with a small smile,
or perhaps a wince.
I sighed. Maybe I was being stupid, living in the past. That he would even ask, would even care what I, the filthy Sodomite,
thought seemed like a huge step forward.
“Dad,” I said, feeling my own eyes sting, “you’re my dad. If Susan makes you happy, and you want to marry her, of course
you have my blessing.”
A tear broke from his eye, was lost in his salt-and-pepper mustache. He reached across the table and covered my hand with
his rough, cracked one.
After a moment he resumed eating, visibly more relaxed than before, as if a balloon that had filled his colon had just been
popped. My heart was enveloped with warm-fuzzies, so glad that we had shared this moment. Things seemed to be looking up for us.
“You know,” he said, pulling another chunk off his cinnamon roll, “it’s really a shame you won’t ever be able to have, you
know, a real family.”
His tone was soft and thoughtful, the way it used when he consoled me after my cat had been run over. Even though he had
hated my cat. He was trying to console me now, to tell me he’s sad for me, that my life will never be whole. That he is sorry I will
always be spit at, looked upon as dirty and wrong. Not that he was okay with me, that the word would change to become a place that
accepted me.
“You won’t know the sanctity marriage, or really have your own kids. I really wish you could have had a normal life, in
God’s graces. That’s too bad.”
My skin prickled, hot, stinging. I think I may have brushed my cheek, as if his blow had been a physical one. The warm,
fuzzy feeling that had moments ago resided near my heart had become a broken-glass inferno. Don’t cry, I told myself. I fixed my
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gaze on my half-eaten kolache. Don’t cry. Say something. But don’t cry. The silence was stretching out, morphing, and I had to say
something, to break it before it swallowed me.
“Hmm,” was all that could pass my constricted vocal cords, so tight they could not vibrate. I cleared my throat.
“So,” I croaked after a moment, “so when’s the wedding?” I didn’t care. I don’t know what he said. The rest of breakfast
might as well have not existed. It was tasteless, sightless, soundless. Afterwards my father drove me back to my mom’s house in his
penny colored Buick.
My dad did marry Susan later that summer, but I did not even get a new sibling from the whole ordeal. Apparently when they
had heard God say “pregnant,” He had actually meant “menopausal.”
When I told my father a year later that April and I planned to marry—or at least have a ceremony, since legally we were not
allowed to marry—I asked him if he would come. He said he didn’t know. He thought he might be busy then, fourteen months later,
when we planned to wed.
“Church trip,” he muttered, not looking at me “Maybe. Going to South Dakota to talk with the Indians.”
That he would prefer to make reparations with strangers for atrocities committed centuries ago rather than bear witness to
what would be one of the happiest days of his own daughter’s life somehow did not surprise me. It didn’t make it hurt any less, but I
was not surprised. But it didn’t matter to me, anymore. It was apparent now that we could not have the kind of relationship with each
other that either of us wanted. He would not share in my joys, my beliefs, and I could not share in his. He would not support me in the
things I loved, would not be there to witness my joys, experience my happiness. I could not share in his, either. And so we came to a
fork in the path, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and then, in unison, we stepped into our respective journeys. I did not look
back.