Pittsburgh

Google can be a real downer.

Sometimes, I like to search for people from my past that I’ve long lost touch with to see how they’re doing. Usually, it’s to satisfy some momentary burst of curiosity inspired by one of the many mental tangents my brain seems to go on. I’ll pass by a piano and wonder what became of my old piano teacher and the music school I used to go to on Saturdays. I’ll write about some lawsuit and wonder whatever happened to some of my law school classmates or former work colleagues. I’ll watch Lebron James throw down a monster dunk and think about some of the guys I used to play basketball with and how we’d feel when one of us would do something like that – on video games we’d play after we were done laying bricks on the basketball court.

Today, I thought of Georgeann Rettberg. I was thinking about why I became a writer in the first place, and she was the first person that I thought of. She was in charge of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project’s Young Writers Institute in Pittsburgh. The program, which is still around today, looks to teach and develop writing skills in schoolchildren from grades 4 through 12. I attended the summer program, which ran five days-a-week for about six weeks, on two occasions. I don’t remember the dates (the second time was in 1991) but suffice to say I was pretty young at the time and would have rather been out having fun instead of using my brain. My parents, however, thought it was a good way for me improve my verbal skills (my dad had the math part covered) so that I could do well on the SAT and get into a good college.