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.