X is for Xavier's School for Gifts Youngsters: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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X is for Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters

It's kind of funny that I got this far down into the list before I admitted that some of the Places in my Heart are imaginary places. Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is found in comic books (and TV shows, cartoons, and movies that spun off from those).  It's where the X-men trained and formed as a group. 

Like the Bat Cave or Stark Tower or the Fortress of Solitude, heroes need a hangout, a home base, and this is it for the mutant crowd.  Generally, it's portrayed as the inherited home of Charles Xavier, who besides being a talented mutant with wide ranging psychic powers, is also a rich English boy from the gentry. (It avoids a lot of problems in superhero stories if you write your characters rich, yet without family to object to the way they use those riches). 

Like any good superhero facility, it has large spaces for practice fighting and building specialized rooms to deal with the problems that arise while newly powered folk are figuring out how to use and control their gifts.  

I, unfortunately, did not develop superpowers during puberty, so I am apparently not a mutant. I'm still holding out hope that the second wave of hormones in menopause will give me something special, though. In fact, I'm writing a whole book series based on that :-).  But in the meantime, maybe I'll find out if they need a Spanish tutor at Xavier's. Some of their missions are bound to take them to Mexico or something, wouldn't you think?