I began writing creatively when I was eight years old.  A few important occurrences happened to me at that age.  I've heard that a child's brain makes a developmental leap at eight or so.  Concepts begin to sparkle, abstract thinking will become routine.  Linked with already abundant imagination, this kind of thought (wondering about things, connecting notions into meanings) can generate much mental material, as a youngster invents a new inner world influenced by an outer world more readily perceived with the senses.  The hope for those who think about these things is a child with a developing mind not contained by the boxes educational systems fold and close around rich and original imaginations, conditioning children to lose genius in favor of regularized thought patterns.
     I grew up before the current educational models of standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, Common Core.  Teachers of my elementary school classes were allowed to choose how they taught their classes, what they taught, and the disciplinary methods meted out if necessary.  All of them were women ranging in age from mid-thirties to early sixties.  None of them had to be taught how to deal with children.  They had learned from experience.  All of them had the sense to know they needed to teach reading, that reading benefits children, activates their imaginations.  All of them knew that good spelling and penmanship skills were useful.  They knew that a knowledge of history, of math, of civic behavior, were important for children to absorb.
     There were colorful characters in my elementary school classes, a few from poor families, one of whom sometimes smelled bad and had a tricky temper, but he wasn't a bad person.  There were two brothers who got in fights sometimes, "tough kids," but they treated me decently and respected my intelligence, even while they generally had lousy grades.  My classes were composed of individuals.  I knew most of them from Kindergarten through fifth grade.  Somehow, a getting-by prevailed, and sanity, without today's rigid educational structures.  The difference, perhaps, has something to do with overpopulation.  The more people in the educational system, the more those who run it try to control pupils, making them conform to technocratic ideals.  Kids don't even seem to organize their own sporting fun anymore.  When I was a kid we just went outside and figured it out without adults standing around remembering, a few of them at least, when they themselves were unmonitored and untracked.
     At age eight I began writing a novel with the Second World War as a setting: The Violent War, an oxymoronic title I realize is funny, but when I was eight I thought I had something.  For many years I thought the manuscript lost.  I found it a few years ago in an old folder, along with some childhood drawings.  Written with a blue ballpoint pen on notebook paper, the story deals with two American pilots in the U.S. Army Air Force, stationed in England in 1944.  One of them, summoned by his superior officer, is given a secret mission.  His friend tries to pry the mission's nature out of him, but they argue for three pages, ending with repetitious insults.  I'll flatter myself and say that it's like something Eugene Ionesco might've written when he was a baby.
     In spite of the unfinished manuscript's title, the hero never gets in his P-51 and starts his secret mission.  My vision of the (violent) war consists of two officers bickering on base.  Maybe I was onto something?  War is a pair of idiots quarreling.
   
                                                                               Vic Neptune