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.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________


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.

____________________________________________________________________

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.