Defining Moments

As I approach 50, I tend to think about the past more. Recently, there are some specific moments that have popped into my head from school days. Here they are:

1. Most Embarrassing Moment

When I was in third grade, we were reading a book about a person stranded on an island in the Pacific. The person comes across something which refers to "Dink." The teacher asked me what the significance of "Dink" was. I was horrified. The only meaning I knew for "dink" was as a synonym for penis. Was the teacher really asking me to talk about a penis in class? I sat there in crimson-faced silence. It turned out that Dink was short for Dinkum which was an Australian name and meant that someone else had been on the island. However, that meaning went straight over my head and I was mortified. I am sure that the teacher had no clue about the alternate meaning.

2. Most Disillusioning, Soul-Sucking Moment

During my sophomore year in high school, my teacher assigned the class to write an alternate ending to the story "The Monkey's Paw." To seamlessly blend the original story with my alternative, I started with the line, "I wish my son alive again." I wrote a very creative piece. However, when I got it back the grade was an F. I asked the teacher what the problem was. She had a policy that anyone using a sentence fragment would receive an F on the assignment. She said that the line I had quoted from the story was a sentence fragment and that I should have changed the language from the story! I was shocked and angry. The teacher assigned us to read this story and yet using the actual language from the story would earn me an F. To make it worse, it wasn't a sentence fragment. The verb "wish" was being used in an active sense rather than the passive "I wish my son was alive" that the teacher preferred. During this time, I was reading Ayn Rand and Alexandr Solyzhenitsyn. I became convinced that high school was a gulag designed to stifle creativity and reward mediocrity. It wasn't (at least not all of the time), but that was how I viewed it through the lens of one callous teacher.

Several years later, a friend asked me why I identified with the Pink Floyd song which had the refrain "We don't need no education/We don't need no thought control/No dark sarcasm in the classroom/Hey teacher, leave those kids alone." This moment was why.

3. Scariest Moment

This also happened my sophomore year in high school. PE was a nightmare for me. The coach would throw a ball at 30 boys and then retreat to his office for the rest of the hour. With 30 unsupervised boys, there was a lot of chest thumping, macho swagger and outright aggression. I learned that you had to push back or you would constantly be bullied. One day we were playing basketball in the gym. Someone shoved me and I shoved him back. He became enraged and shoved me down some steps. I bloodied my knee and wanted to go to the nurse to get it cleaned up. However, the coach would not let me go unless I told him who did it. Foolishly, I broke the code and told him. Later that day, I ran into the same person in the hall. He came up to me and said "I wasn't f***ing around. I'm going to finish it." Something in his eyes made me realize that this was not a garden variety threat. I went to the assistant principal almost in tears. He assured me that this person would not be hurting anyone. He was kicked out of school and I never saw him again. Later, he was arrested for murder. It turns out he had killed a freshman the year before for snitching on him.

4. Most Fortuitous Moment

One day during my junior year, I sat down to take the PSAT. I don't think I knew what the PSAT was or its significance. It was just another standardized test. Back then, we didn't have prep classes and didn't have it drilled into our heads that these tests were the most important things in the world. My results came back and I was a national merit semi-finalist. This changed my life. I was always a good student, but I made plenty of Bs (see #2 above) which meant that I was not an academic rock star. However, with this one test, I not only got my picture in the paper, but was inspired to believe that I could do well in life (or at least in taking standardized tests).

5. Most Ironic Moment

I took journalism for three years in high school. Every year, there was a UIL contest in journalism. My teacher entered me in headline writing. I did well enough that I got to go to regionals in Lubbock. The result of that was that I earned a letter. I bought a letter jacket to put my letter on. Suddenly, I could walk the halls with the same letter jacket that the jocks wore. It was funny because, like most Texas high schools, we had a culture which focused on football. There were no pep rallies for the math club or the school newspaper. However, someone in the school decided that letters could be given for academic contests and I had one. The really funny thing was that the actual headlines that I wrote for the school newspaper never fit right and almost always had to be done over.

6. Happiest Moment

During my sophomore year in college, I asked a girl in my dorm if she would like to go to see a campus production of Godspell with me. I don't think I had exchanged more than three words with her and she was not in any of my classes. It was a shot in the dark. She said no, that she was going with her father. The day of the play, she told me that her father had cancelled and would I like to go with her. This was a first. A girl actually asked me out. That was my first date with my wife and we have been married for 26 years now.

There are probably other moments that are worth mentioning, but these are the ones that stand out.