Days With The Dolphins

Carole and Jack on shore for a family wedding.

Sitting at the breakfast table before school one Monday morning, 13-year-old Carole Crowe wistfully watched snowflakes drift their way to the frozen ground outside her Long Island home. But when a shiver ran down her spine it wasn’t from the bone-chilling cold outside but from the realization that she had forgotten her homework.

Quickly she penned a poem, using the only inspiration she could draw from in that instant, the snow. Those tiny crystals from above would be her saviors. Carole handed in the poem, worried that the sage nun would be able to divine from her heavenly connections that she had done her homework in haste. So when the nun approached days later, Carole was not surprised. Despite her fears, she was relieved to hear that all the sister wanted her to do was rewrite the poem more legibly so it could be submitted in a poetry contest. Carole won an honorable mention with that fledgling poem – the beginning, she says, of her long and winding journey as an accomplished writer.

Read the entire article in the January 2004 issue