Unearthed

One of my coworkers recently published his first novel. This auspicious event has gotten me thinking about my own earliest experiences with writing. (If I may shill for a moment, I found The Stolen Child to be insightful and entertaining. It grapples with the notion of identity and presents some original takes on relationships.)
When I was younger, I was a science devotee, a purest. I was entranced by physics and astronomy and loved their language, math. Having been raised by a biological database guru (before the term “bioinformatics” was common-parlance), with the cruel tutelage of an older brother who is an ascetic in the discipline of computer science, I learned that the sciences natural, hard, and applied, were the only avenues of learning.
I was blindsided in high school by finding fiction inside and outside of the classroom that actually got me thinking. Tragedy of tragedies, I was even taken-in by all the useless beauty of a poem. I started writing in lieu of doing banal homework assignments. There was as much wisdom in this pursuit as folly.
There would come a day that would change the universe, in which I realized the obvious course of combining writing with the love of science, but this is a story for another time. For now, I leave you with that first poem that as a very young person, caught my eye.

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

- E. E. Cummings