For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to be a writer. And I have a pretty good memory. Then again, I'm only twenty. Ask me again in 70 years and we'll see. Hopefully it'll remain intact.

But my mother, ever the patron of "save everything!" has these funny old notebooks. See, she used to work for a car dealership, back when I was very little. She was an accountant there and at the end of a year, if they had extra date books that they didn't need and that were going to become obsolete anyhow, my mom would bring several home for me to write in.

I was only three or four at the time, but I can still remember grabbing a blue pen and writing lines and lines of scribbles, ignoring the dates at the sides of the pages and just going to town. Most of these scribbles are just that--lines and curves--a youngsters imitation of cursive. I have no idea what they mean anymore of course but they were stories once I suppose.

Once I started preschool and was about 4, almost 5, I got more sophisticated. Mom never ceased to supply me with paper and during free time at preschool, my friends and I would often divvy up the stack of printer paper courtesy of my mom. They would often draw. I, on the other hand, wrote letters. Line after line of letters, hoping to hit upon the magical combination that would make those intriguing things called words and that I had seen in books.

I remember one day in particular. Mom had come to pick me up from school and I proudly showed her one of the sheets covered in letters. She scanned the page, nodding her approval and smiling. Suddenly she said, "Meggie, you have a word here."

My little eyes opened wide in surprise. "What word?" I craned to see the paper as she held it down low enough for me to see.

"Right here," she said, pointing at a spot near the middle of the page. "This right here is the word 'boy'. B-O-Y. Good job, sweetheart."

It's hard to say what gave me that urge to write, to search for words before I even really knew what they were. But it's always been there.

I've never forgotten the day I (albeit accidentally) wrote the word 'boy'. It was the first of many to come.

Sometimes they're still accidents. :)