The first creative thing that I ever wrote in my life is entitled A Trip To Tijuana. I was thirteen and in the seventh grade at Coronado (California) Junior High School. It was lunch time and I was waiting for my turn to play tetherball. I sat at a picnic table just doodling in my notebook when I suddenly, for some unknown reason, realized that Tijuana and marijuana rhymed. Fifteen minutes later my first poem, hand written on college ruled, three hole punched white paper was taking its rightful place in my three ring binder. I did not share it with any of my friends or classmates, but I was excited about showing it to my mom and my dad at the dinner table that night. By 7:00PM that evening my poem had made its way from my parents hands, and a personal recital of the composition over the telephone to all four of my grandparents, to the front and center location of the refrigerator door where it would proudly remain on display until well into the summer. It was the fall of 1962. I was thirteen.
My thirteenth year was noteworthy and there is still a paperclip on that page in my book of life because before I would reach the age of fourteen my parents marriage would come to an abrupt end, I would get laid for the very first time, I would be shipped off to a military school, the country would almost go into a nuclear war with the Soviet union over the Cuban Missile Crises and President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Thirteen was the age I was when I discovered the right side of my brain and started writing and playing a musical instrument. It was like sunshine on a stormy sea. A troubled teenager with pen and paper, an out of tune upright piano, a Sears and Roebuck guitar and Hoener Marine Band Harmonica.
Rick Ellis
