The other day, standing in my kitchen, I realized that mine was probably one of the few un-upgraded kitchens in the neighborhood.  When we moved to the DC area in 2005 the house we bought had an ’80s kitchen, and we’ve never replaced the plastic cabinets and countertops with the seemingly requisite wood and granite.  And I realized I didn’t care.

Why not?  A lot of the reason has to do with Hunter.  Hunter—and my parents as well—taught me that matters of the mind are more important than matters of, for example, who has what kind of material on their countertops.

Remember when the going opinion in our home neighborhoods was that we were “Hunter snobs”?  I may have denied it then, but I now see that that it’s true—Hunter taught me to be an intellectual snob.  I know it sounds awful, and I think I hide it really well, but I am an inner snob.  It probably all started when they taught us the Sarah Maria Jones song in seventh grade and I took those incredibly obnoxious and politically incorrect lyrics to heart. The fact is, though, that those lyrics have helped me get through life ever since. Being an intellectual elitist has made it easier to weather difficult times and to clarify what my values are, and aren’t.

Another thing Hunter gave me is a result of all those essays we had to do as part of timed tests.  We were given just a few minutes to think up, outline, and then execute cogent essays, and we worked on those paragraphs as if our lives depended on it.  Our lives did seem to depend on it because our marks did, and marks seemed all-important then.  Was our hunger for good marks a bad thing?  I don’t know, but I do know that all that time-pressured writing practice served me well in writing/ghost-writing jobs that I’ve undertaken.

More broadly, Hunter’s emphasis on English-language skills helped me in editorial work; it also inspired me to never give up in my search for the right word and rhythm in creative-writing endeavors. For years I wrote short personal essays, and more recently I’ve turned to plays, and all along I’ve felt like one of those fairy-tale people locked in a tower with a bunch of straw—my life experiences—and directed to spin it into gold—an essay or play.  Because of Hunter, I’ve usually felt I could do it.