Kramer’s Kronicles and Kollege

 

When my son was in elementary school he liked to write stories from time to time in his school notebooks and even illustrate them with drawings.  Some were required for school but others were done just for fun.  Early on he would weave in elements of Minecraft that he played on my old iPad.  We still laugh about his main character charging into a cave of zombies sword-in-hand with the cry “FOR LIFE!” 

He drew ideas from TV, especially reality shows that would cut off at some particularly thrilling point for commercials in cliffhanger fashion.  He picked up on this notion and would end some of his chapters or sections of a story with an element of acute danger or excitement that forced the reader to pause but then continue on reading in anticipation of a resolution.

And as he went from grade to grade his tastes changed.  He had a scary story phase somewhere around 3^rd and 4^th grade and then was coming up with ideas for sports-related stories in 5^th and 6^th grade which reflected his experiences of competing on baseball and basketball teams.

To encourage this early on I created a blog site for him called “Kramer’s Kronicles” which was a riff on his middle name and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”.  I would take his hand written stories and type them into the blog and then get his ideas about possible pictures to illustrate them if possible.  These stories became few and far between as he progressed into middle school despite my encouraging him to keep writing.

At some point I imagined he was done with all of that as a passing childhood fancy but it lingered in the form of high school writing assignments.  In this context he would sometimes come home excited about things his English teacher would say about things he’d written.  His attitude was always one of astonishment that he had the ability to create something compelling from the words he would write.  This recently found a kind of culmination in his personal essay for his college application.  It was well thought out and emotionally charged in a way that I can only imagine caught the attention of College Admissions and helped him get an early acceptance letter from his favorite college this past weekend.

And so here I am thinking of those early years of Kramer’s Kronicles and an idea has formed in my head of an image that combines a picture I took of him over the weekend at a college visit and a Martian landscape as imagined by the great SciFi artist Michael Whelan for Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”.  It is a visual “kronicle” of the journey my son has made over, around, and through many obstacles to find himself at a point that was hardly imaginable all those years ago.

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