Memory Dump

Sample Memory: Meeting Alice

It was my senior year of high school, and it was time for the big literary research paper. Everyone jumped on a classic author: Shakespeare for Bobby, William Blake for Stetson, Graham Greene for Liz. Everyone had an author, but I was in the the dark. I had no idea who I wanted to write about, and to make matters worse, everyone knew I wanted to teach English.

I searched and I searched. The interesting ones were taken and the others just sounded flat. It was around this time that our English teacher reminded us to not feel limited to the authors we'd studied. I threw my textbook aside and went to the library in search of an author and found one in the unlikeliest of places, the children's section.

The book was Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It wasn't the manliest of topics, but I knew I could finish the book in a couple of hours and pushing through the book seemed a lot more pleasant than examining Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for a month. I had never been a fan of research, but Alice sucked me in. Carroll's carefully crafted satire painted an interesting picture of the England he lived in at the time.

It would be my first encounter with Alice, but certainly not my last. I got an "A" on the paper, and I've never scored lower on a Carroll project since. To this day, it's one of the few works of British literature I truly enjoy.