Not a Sparrow Falls

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.
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I went to Chicago’s North Park Nature Center the other day – to learn about sparrows.

Just going to the Nature Center itself always provokes flights of fancy in me. The Center’s conservators are currently devoted to turning the acreage back into native prairie and wetlands conditions. Walking along the trails lined with goldenrod and bluestem grass is interesting. But I remember when this land was devoted to another, equally interesting use. I remember when it was one of the last tuberculosis sanitaria in the U.S.

Right here, in the middle of Chicago’s busy urban north-side, there was this asylum for victims of “consumption” (the old word for tuberculosis). The last residents of the sanitarium were relocated (where were they sent?) in the 1960’s. After that, the land was hotly contested for several years, with competing interests vying for ownership. The conservationists eventually largely won out over the condo developers. A few senior citizen apartment complexes were nestled back in the parklands. But for the most part, the land has been handed over to the Park District as a place where citizens can come to study and commune with nature.

I often walked the ground when it was in transition though. It had a haunted, fading quality. The extended arbors on which the tuberculosis patients once grew grape vines as part of their fresh-air regimen were collapsing. The glass panels of the greenhouses were shattered and sharded. It was like a page out of a Southern gothic novel – beautifully bygone, but dangerous with bitter loss. The huge red brick building that used to be the “natatorium” where the patients could swim is still there. It was rehabbed and is a more generalized gymnasium now. However, there are nooks and crannies about the place that are still as they were in the days of the insidious TB bacterium, old hiding places where I would hate to poke a stick.

But the other day I went to my sparrow lecture in full sunshine. Most of the nature classes are held in a smaller, cozier red brick building. There is a fireplace in the main room where we gather. And the rafters of the room are usually decorated according to the season – twinkling white lights in the winter – papier mâché butterflies made by children in the summer.

A panel of expert birders was there to walk us through the fine points of sparrow identification. They handed out charts that labeled the different external anatomical parts of the bird, emphasizing the parts we could use as points of distinction. There is the superciliary (the eyebrow), the malar (the mustache area), the crown and whatever median line runs through it.

One of the best tips we got though was to observe the overall form of the bird. Look at its silhouette. If it is relatively small and has a long, narrow tail, it is likely to be a member of the Spizella genus. Around Chicago, that means there’s a good chance it is either a Field Sparrow or a Chipping Sparrow. If the bird has a stubbier tail, it may be of the Ammodramus genus. Maybe it’s a Grasshopper Sparrow, or if it has more lines on its face, it might be a Henslow’s Sparrow.

Another valuable tip to identifying sparrows – watch where they feed and watch where they flush to when they are frightened. Some species almost always forage in groups on the ground and flush further away into the grass when they are frightened. Some don’t like a background of trees at all. Other species may feed singly and flush into a shrub or a tree when they sense danger. I wouldn’t have thought to look at such behavior as a key to identification.

One instructor said that learning to distinguish the different kinds of local sparrows was like becoming a fine wine connoisseur – without the elitist connotations of that term “connoisseur.” But the point is – everyone can specify a preference for either “red” or “white” wine. Almost everyone can distinguish a cardinal from a bluejay. But if one would truly like to think of oneself as a nature lover – if one would truly like to travel down the path to becoming a naturalist – that means learning how to make finer distinctions. It means being willing to abide in nature long enough, lovingly enough to become aware of subtler distinctions.

I liked that analogy. And then another analogy involving sparrows came to mind. I remembered one noted feminist saying that women in this society could never be truly free and equal until people learn to love the sparrow.

She didn’t elaborate on this rather enigmatic remark. But I think I know what she meant. Unless a woman engages in time-consuming, straining measures – she won’t be noticed. In order to stand out, she must paint on a lot of flash. She must regularly prune herself into a strikingly artificial topiary form. Otherwise, she will be relegated to the status of sparrow – common, unremarkable. She won’t have the command of a typical man who is taller, more muscular. A man, with his bushier eyebrows and bolder, more prominent features, just naturally tends to be more vivid. And certainly a man, at least in many age categories, is a much rarer bird.

Older women are the sparrows of our society by virtue of numbers alone. Convalescent homes and senior citizen living facilities are notoriously female preserves. Almost everyone resident there is female. Women live longer. Surviving men perhaps are likelier to have younger, still healthy mates to take care of them in their own homes. So it’s women, women, women, you see out and about on tours and on retirement cruises, doing volunteer work, in gardening clubs.

It is easy to view them as an undifferentiated mass. It is easy to become dismissive and to look over their shoulders in the direction of that blaze of red cardinal. Even the nicest media stars take a dismissive tone when they refer to their matinee audiences. They say that they will be performing that afternoon for the usual “flock of little old blue-haired ladies.” They do their best to disassociate themselves from this demographic. They sigh and shrug, as if to underscore the fact that they play to these individuals not by choice, but simply as a matter of contractual obligation.

Well, perhaps it is true that they will be statistically less likely to find someone in those matinee audiences who will appreciate the edgy, avant-garde nature of a performance. Still, there “might be giants” out there. There might be genius that can appreciate the script better than even the performer himself does. And there almost certainly will be beauty. But the beauty will be the beauty of a sparrow, requiring more commitment and concentration before revealing itself.

Until people can learn to be interested in their fellow human beings selflessly – without the urgencies of sex or profit prodding them – then women are indeed doomed to being second-class citizens in society, to being the sparrows. When they are younger, they will be tied to the labor of bringing out their best features with mascara and lipstick and diet in order to be visible to the casual observer. When they are older, they will fall irremediably under the heading of “flock.”

Everyone’s attention will be turned to the soar of the masculine eagle, to the bright self-assertion of the woodpecker. And all those sparrows underneath, with their drabber, more difficult tones, will be invisible – except to the most discerning eye.

Spelling Bee - Part II

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

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And finally the dread day of the Spelling Bee arrived.

My mother took me on the bus to Francis Parker High School, the old red brick building that hosted the annual District Bee. My classmates had been given the day off so they could attend the event. They’d been provided with directions on how to get here. Since they were all older, it was assumed they could manage the trip on public transportation on their own, without the need of any accompanying adult. Except for the boy I thought was going to be my partner up on stage - he had been brought by his housemother.

This boy lived a precarious, prejudiced life because of having been placed in the Uhlich Foster Home. The Uhlich Home wasn’t for orphans. It was for children whose parents were “temporarily” unable to care for them. But often that temporary status in fact stretched to official adulthood, when the youngsters were simply “aged out” of the system. Meanwhile, these children existed in limbo. They weren’t eligible for adoption since their parents were ostensibly waiting in the wings, just needing a breather before they would resume their parental obligations. But in fact, most of the parents never did recover their ability to care for their children – and so the children languished in their eternal waiting room.

Our grade school accepted all the kindergarten-eighth graders from that facility. And their presence brought out the Dickensian meanness in many of the teachers. “Those damned Uhlich kids” became the perennial scapegoats. They bore the brunt of the teachers’ pent-up hostilities and sadisms. Some of the teachers automatically started picking on any Uhlich student they had in their class from the moment the starting bell knelled the beginning of each school day. It was like watching the inexplicable pecking to death of one chicken by a gang of other chickens. It’s not always clear what causes one chick to be singled out this way. Sometimes it’s an obvious vulnerability; but sometimes the trigger is obscure, lying deep in some medullar instinct somewhere.

So a Uhlich student became the teacher’s automatic target. He would be sent to the dunce’s corner first thing in the morning, before he’d even had a chance to commit any transgression. There the teacher would fling humiliations at him throughout the day. The student’s only release was the day’s end. And I doubted that was any kind of release at all. I imagined he just shuffled from one locus of ritualistic abuse to another as he walked from the school back to his foster home for the evening. I didn’t know for sure what went on beyond the locked grillwork gate of that Home, behind those stone walls – but again, I pictured the most heartrending series of block print illustrations from a Dickens’ novel.

I had once almost gotten lumped in with these Uhlich students by a fourth-grade teacher, a woman with an especially sharp ax to grind. Along with the one actual Uhlich student in our class, I had also been taken as a handy coat hanger for this woman’s billowing frustration and rage. Whenever I mispronounced a word during reading period, the woman took the mistake as an occasion for a searing, humiliating condemnation of every aspect of my being. When I forgot to bring lunch money, the teacher declaimed the failure before the whole class as a clear indication of the total failure I was to become in life.

But then things changed suddenly. My mother wrote a particularly literate, slightly humorous, slightly flattering excuse note to the teacher explaining one of my many absences. And shortly after that, the teacher met my mother in person at a PTA meeting. During their conversation, my teacher learned that my mother was a graduate from an Ivy League University, and that my father owned a thriving neighborhood business. And from that day forward, the teacher’s persecution of me turned to fawning.

All the abuse that would have been heaped on me, now was heaped two-fold on the one actual Uhlich student in our class. That student had no parents in the picture to write literate notes to the teacher. That student had no college graduate mother, no businessman father standing prestigiously behind her. That student walked to school alone, without anyone to hold her hand – without anyone to object to whatever cruel treatment the world decided to mete out to her.

I felt wretched about this undeserved reprieve I’d been granted from the teacher’s abuse. But I did nothing to correct the injustice. I was just glad it wasn’t me under the teacher’s thumb any more. And that made me feel all the more wretched and cowardly. I realized I was one more person who had abandoned the Uhlich girl to her fate. But I guessed the Uhlich students were used to it.

I guessed that had been pretty much the same dismal grade-school experience my spelling bee partner had suffered through, although I had only landed here in the same class with him in eighth-grade. But I could see how he’d become inured. He walked down the school corridors mutely, as if in shell shock. However after he’d been chosen for this spelling bee, that had started to change. He began to blossom. He smiled; he talked occasionally. He became more and more eager and expansive as the day of the spelling bee drew close – just the opposite of me. Fred told me how his housemother was going to bring him to the event, and how he had even invited his real mother. She was going to take the day off of work to come see him.

He didn’t go into a lot of details, but I got the impression that this was to be the start of a whole new chapter between him and his mother. The fact that he was selected to represent the school in the bee was proof that he was a good student, a good boy, a worthy son. Maybe it would draw his mother back from her estrangement and they could be a family again. I saw in Fred’s eyes a reflection of the gleaming prospect that he wouldn’t be “one of those damn Uhlich kids” much longer.

And there he was sitting, near the front of the Francis Parker School Auditorium when my mother and I arrived. I hardly recognized him. His hair was brushed and Brilliantined back into daguerreotype formality. We made our way down the row toward him and sat. He was really happy. He whispered proudly to me, “There’s my mother – back there.” He waved his hand in a general over-the-shoulder direction. I couldn’t make out which of the many heads bobbing with pride he might be referring to. So I broadcast a general smile of acknowledgment.

Then everything happened so fast. My home room teacher leaned over to me and ordered, “Time to get up on stage. Get your placard!”

Fred and I both rose. But the teacher stopped him. “Not you, not you,” he said impatiently. “You’re just the alternate.”

Fred looked bewildered. I didn’t know what was going on either. But there was no time. The teacher was shooing me onstage. I jostled around with the other contestants for a bit, then found my seat up there, facing out the other way this time, into the dim maw of the Auditorium.

I didn’t have a chance to dwell on this mix-up. The spelling bee was starting. The moderator announced that there would be a warm-up round. She told us this first round would count, but she beamed that she was confident most of us would get through it without any trouble. And we started to tick off.

The contestant ahead of me got the word “laundry.” Not too bad. I would have known that – although it seemed a little tricky for a “warm-up round.” Then my turn. I lurched into the spotlight and looked out at the assemblage. I saw Fred in one of the front rows. His face had turned ashen. I still didn’t understand. Wasn’t he going to be up on the stage with me at all? And where was the rest of our class? I couldn’t see all the way to the back of the Auditorium or up into the balconies. Maybe they were out there, somewhere.

I couldn’t distract myself with these questions any longer though. My time had come. I had to stand and deliver. The spelling bee judge hurled the fateful word – “Myrrh.”

Myrrh? Myrrh? I was stunned. I had never heard so much as a whisper of this word. Myrrh!! I knew a million words – or so everyone said. But I’d never heard of myrrh!

I don’t remember if I had the presence of mind to ask for a definition and for the word origin. Since I’d had virtually no coaching for this event, I don’t think I’d been told that was my right, although somewhere along the way, I probably had gathered some sense I could ask for that information.

But whether I asked for definitions or not, I knew it was useless. To think – I had practiced, practiced – boning up on onomatopoeia and numismatist – only to meet my Waterloo on a one-syllable word. Myrrh. A practice word!

I took a stab at it. Against all reason, by some impossible intuition, I know I put an “h” in there somewhere. How I sensed that much, I’ll never know. I think I sputtered out a spelling like, “M-U-I-R-H.” With that, I’d shot my wad. I heard the dismissal bell. I was pronounced “wrong,” and made my way off the stage. Well, at least the pressure was off. I could enjoy the rest of the day as a spectator.

As I picked my way through the rows of contestants-still-in-the-running, I heard a girl sneer sotto voce to the student next to her, “She missed the easiest one. Everyone knows ‘myrrh.’” Well, I hadn’t known it. As I later learned, it is part of the famous Biblical pair of “frankincense and myrrh.” But I had never read the Bible. I had never been exposed to the slightest fragment of religious mythology. I guess the devout would say God came and punished me as an infidel that day. But really, myrrh! Could there be an odder word anywhere in the English language?

As I sheepishly took my place back next to my mother and homeroom teacher in the audience, I feared the teacher’s rebuke. He could be a harsh, sarcastic person. But surprisingly, he made light of my failure. “That’s OK,” he comforted. “That was a tough word.” I looked down the row at Fred. He was staring straight ahead, like a deer caught in headlights. I wondered if he would have known “myrrh.” Regretfully, I guessed he would have.

At that moment, the proceedings on stage were interrupted. There was a commotion in the balcony. We all turned and looked up. It was the rest of my class, boisterously traipsing in, displaying varying degrees of macho dishevelment. Marhsall’s face was streaked with mud in a war paint pattern. Leonard had one sleeve of his jacket rakishly torn away. Our home teacher grimaced and made swatting gestures at them. But they didn’t see us way down by the orchestra pit. They jovially stumbled over each other finding seating up there in the crow’s nest, and finally the spelling bee was able to resume.

I felt relieved that they hadn’t been there to witness my disgrace – me, the one they called “the brain,” the one whose homework they all copied. Maybe they’d never hear that I’d been eliminated on the warm-up round. Maybe they’d forget to ask why I wasn’t on stage when they got here. As the rounds of spelling wore on, I did hear a hoarse query from the balcony, “Where’s she at? I don’t see ‘er.” But it didn’t seem to be a pressing concern with them. And the spelling bee carried on to an uneventful conclusion without me.

Then we all scattered our separate ways home. Those late arriving members of my class roistered out as they had roistered in. My mother and I walked back to the bus stop. As we were walking, I caught a glimpse of Fred being ushered by his housemother toward a car. He looked as if he didn’t know or didn’t care where he was. I felt a knot in my stomach tighten.

The next day at school a few of those Fonz-like boys who’d clamored into the balcony did make reference to my early elimination from the bee. They’d heard. But they shrugged my failure off with good humor. You might even say they were mildly “supportive,” if that term had been in use then, and if you could ever characterize the demeanor of a gang of delinquent boys as “supportive.” At any rate, my spelling bee fiasco didn’t seem to have lowered me in their esteem. I assumed I would be as sought-after as dispenser of homework and quiz answers as ever.

However there was something wrong. There was a buzz in the air as we all flopped into our seats that morning and waited for the homeroom teacher, who was unusually late. I sat there, trying to piece together the snatches of excited conversation I heard bandied in back of me. As I was craning my neck around to be better included in this rush of rumor, I was brought back face-front by a terrifying crash.

Our teacher had arrived. He’d slammed a room-shaking load of books down on his desk. His usual cool remove was replaced with raw rage. “That’s the last time – the last time – you animals ever get out of your cages!” he screamed. “I’m going to see to it you never go across the street again, much less across town! Do you know – we’ve been getting calls all night, all morning – people reporting vandalism! You were always the worst class, but this does it! This is it!”

He stormed on, becoming more and more incoherent. But I gathered that our class had taken the occasion of their release from a day of classes to become pillaging Huns. They had cut a wide swathe of destruction across the city on their way to the spelling bee – ransacking, burning, looting. They toppled telephone poles and stop signs. They smashed windows. They spray-painted everything in their path. They started fires in apartment lobbies. They buffeted old ladies against garbage pails. They terrorized the driver of every bus they boarded.

It was true, our class had been branded as the worst in the School’s history even before this episode. The Uhlich students aside, we had that unusual concentration of older, demoted boys in the class and they had been chronically delinquent. They had made our class the original “Blackboard Jungle.” When people deplore the current epidemic of violence in classrooms and look back wistfully to “the good old days” – I can’t help but cast a dubious look their way. Their recollection of those days seems very selective. It’s true that students didn’t generally carry guns some decades ago – and weren’t generally high on crack or cocaine. But they had switchblades. Has everyone forgotten about switchblades?

Most of the students in my class carried a switchblade. One girl cut off the tip of her finger while we were only oh-so-mildly rehearsing three-part harmony during music period. She said she’d just been playing with her knife. One of the most unpopular teachers in the school was permanently blinded in one eye when a switchblade came hurtling at her down the corridor. The thrower of that switchblade (now one of the ringleaders of the mayhem en route to the spelling bee) had claimed he’d just been fooling around – trying to throw the blade to a friend of his down at the other end of the hall. The teacher had just haplessly stepped in the way of the projectile. So, another accident?

After all these accidents, plus vicious weekly switchblade fights on the school grounds, the school principle had been careful to assign only the toughest males available to teach our class. It didn’t help much though. Every day for these teachers was pretty much like Glenn Ford’s first day in The Blackboard Jungle. That’s why I smile knowingly to myself whenever I hear anyone lamenting “Today’s kids – all the shooting – drugs – violence - all because we took God out of the schools.”

Although it’s true - that particular group of students I found myself among in eighth-grade wasn’t exactly typical. We had the worst offenders among us, not because of Uhlich’s contribution to our population, but mostly because of that unusual concentration of demoted, older boys in the class. They were chaffing to get out from behind those pinching little desks and out into the wider world. And now they had thrown that proverbial straw on the camel’s back. After all the detentions they had racked up earlier that year – now this culminating vandalism. As our homeroom teacher continued his tirade, Fred and I could sit there, the only indisputably innocent bystanders. Nevertheless, our class as a whole was going to be punished.

Our teacher was reeling off the consequences of this flagrant cross-country pillage. Some of the boys would be sent to St. Charles, the distant reform school. Some would be held back again in the process. I imagined none of them would stick around to turn eighteen in grade-school. So that would probably be the end of their academic careers.

But there was more. As our homeroom teacher picked up a large book and slammed it gratuitously back down on the desk a second time for parting-shot emphasis – he yelled out at us that it had been decided our class trip would be canceled. No bus ride to the State Capital. “We don’t want you animals out in the streets any more – ever again!” The School would go ahead with the graduation ceremony (minus those youths who would be sitting it out in the reformatory, of course). The ballroom event at which the usual presentation of graduating class presents was made – would instead take place in private. We would each receive a paperback dictionary down in a basement storage room. All of us would be kept away from decent folk. “You are the worst class I’ve ever had or ever will have! You’re incorrigible - an embarrassment – a disgrace!!” the teacher spat out. And that was that.

I never saw those ringleaders of the spelling bee spree of vandalism again. I did see Fred every day for the remaining weeks until graduation. He had drawn back into pale numbness. He didn’t reproach me for not knowing “myrrh.” He never spoke to me at all after that. I never saw him speak to anyone unless he was spoken to. He just came and went, in a zombie trance. He stayed at Uhlich. No other home was opened to him.

The teachers, the counselors had decided to enter the School in the spelling bee just as a last-minute, off-hand sort of thing. No one had bothered to tell Fred or me what it was all about, which of us would be the real contestant. We were just sent. The teachers took a shot. No big deal.

It struck me that there had in fact been a crime committed that day – a crime worse than the crime of spray-painting walls or toppling street signs. And as usual, that really devastating crime had been the crime of casualness.

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I would like to hear from any of you who were ever contestants in a spelling bee and who have adventures to tell. Write a paragraph or two. What word did you win or lose on? I will try to post as many of your comments as I can.

Spelling Bee - Part I

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one things, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

This is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side - but many different views, many different adventures.
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I recently watched the movie Akeelah and the Bee. It was heartwarming enough – about an inner-city youngster who might otherwise have slid down into conformist ghetto ways, but who finds her unique voice through her participation in the National Spelling Bee Contest. However the movie made me sad. It made me recall my own participation in that Contest. It made me recall the almost overwhelming drama and poignancy that swirled around my moment in the spotlight.

I was in eighth grade. Out of nowhere, I was called into the school counselor’s office. I cringed; I quaked. A summons from the counselor never bode well. I thought for sure I was in for another lecture on how I didn’t seem to fit in, on how I didn’t seem to have any friends. I thought I faced more unanswerable “What are we going to do with you?” shakes of the head. But no, this time, the counselor only had a specific assignment for me. She wanted me to represent the School in the upcoming Spelling Bee Contest.

The District Contest was scheduled for the following month. My grade school had never entered anyone in the contest before. But here at the last minute, they had decided they might as well take a shot. And my name had risen to the surface. I’d scored in the 99+ percentile on English Usage/Vocabulary in the last standardized test. And that autobiography I’d turned in as graduation requirement had shown I had quite a “good command of the language.” So I was it. They also incidentally selected another youth in my class who had done well on the standardized tests, a youth from the nearby foster home. But I gathered that I was to be their Great Bright Hope.

My participation was all so improvised though. I didn’t receive any coaching like Akeelah in the movie did. Oh, one of the classroom teachers did immediately take me aside for a half hour or so and drilled me on tricky words that came into his head. He discovered that I had a woeful inability to distinguish “ible” from “able” suffix words. I spelled “contemptible” with a disastrous “able” at the end. As soon as this vulnerability came to light, he concentrated on giving me those execrible (oops, -able) words as practice – and I almost always guessed wrong. I could see worry, and yes, regret, shadowing the teacher’s face. But it was too late for them to withdraw me as School Representative now. They were stuck with me.

So with deep dubiety furrowing the teacher’s brow, he sent me home to study on my own. “Concentrate on those able/ible words,” he commanded as I walked off down the hall in a state of shellshock. I had been double-promoted past several grades. So I was only eleven, whereas most of my classmates had been held back a year or two and were sixteen and even seventeen by this time. But in addition to being young, I was actually probably somewhat retarded. The world was an incomprehensible, primordial chaos to me (and still is). All I was good at was reading, at following the straight lines of printing across a page, grasping the individual words like pearls on a necklace. I felt their smooth roundness or slight imperfections. I sensed the layers of nuance and connotation that had built each word up to its present opalescence.

But I couldn’t function in the “real” world. I had no idea how to go to a school hangout and buy a soda. In fact, soda bottles frightened me, with their threat of uncapping into some fizzing geyser of preternatural liquid. And I didn’t know how to go places. I had no idea how to negotiate paying a bus fare and riding along a route I couldn’t actually pace or feel. So I walked almost everywhere I had to go. I was like a lab rat negotiating a maze, aware only of some vague scent drawing me on to some undefined destination. I had no access to a bird’s-eye view of anything.

With all these mental handicaps, you can imagine how the prospect of being in a spelling bee loomed for me. I’d have to go to a different school, in a different part of the city, and stand up on stage and PERFORM. So I walked away from that brief coaching like a death row inmate walking his last corridor.

But I tried. In the short weeks that followed, I drilled and drilled. I studied word lists. My classmates, aware of me for the first time, threw words at me. Well, mostly it was just one word they threw at me – antidisestablishmentarianism. That was the popular “hard” word of the day because it was cited as being the longest. Actually, it was as easy as railway tracks – straightforward, spelled just as it’s pronounced. But I cheerfully clicked along it each time a classmate proposed it to me, so we could all feel briefly united in the cause.

At home though, I trotted out the really hard words. I refreshed my familiarity with the likes of “oxymoron” and “amanuensis.” I remember lingering, somewhat amused, over the oddity of those two “n’s” in mayonnaise. I never could seem to get a handle on whether a word ended in “able” or “ible.” I just had to hope I’d get lucky on that score and wouldn’t be given any words with that fateful forking. I kept at it - up all night, pause for a dish of ice cream in the morning, then back to the list. (My parents were hippies-ahead-of-their-time who allowed everything, who in fact would never have thought of imposing any “rule” on me or on the world at large.) I assumed the full burden of self-discipline. The three weeks of this grind seemed simultaneously interminable and all too briefly inadequate a preparation time.

And finally the dread day arrived.

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I will tell the tragedy that followed in my next posting. But meanwhile, I would like to hear from any of you who were ever contestants in a spelling bee and who have adventures to tell. Write a paragraph or two. What word did you win or lose on? I will try to post as many of your comments as I can.