My Story 
Wood, Susan

>>SUSAN: Hi, my name is Susan Wood and when I was ten years old my family moved to California and I discovered the magic of Ice Plant, which if you're not a Californian you may not know it's a finger-shaped, succulent - and what I found out is if you break a piece of it off there's this thick juice that flows out of it and you can write with it and it's invisible until the sun hits it and it's brown. It was so much fun that one day, a Sunday, I left my house and my back yard and went to the school yard which is right next door and used this magic writing tool to write an invisible script all over the elementary school that I was attending. I must have been practicing my cursive with my name because the next day the principal came and knocked on my fourth grade classroom door and he hauled me out and he handed me a bucket with soapy water and a huge brush and I spent hours scrubbing the school. It was an open kind of classroom so my classmates watched, it was painful. It's not that I wasn't used to being in trouble, it's just that I was new in the school and it was extra hard. Later that afternoon I was back at my desk and it was quiet and my wonderful fourth grade teacher, Mrs. McKinsey from '56 but I remember her well, she called me to her desk and she said, "Susan," and I knew I was in trouble again and I said, "Yes?" She said, "When you grow up you need to go to college and major in English and be a writer." That's what I did. [Laughing] That's my story.