An Event that Taught Me Something

This is another in the series of personal narratives I am writing during Writing Workshop time at school. Hopefully by modeling the behaviors of a writer and showing how work can be published and shared with others, I can eliminate some of the hatred for writing that my students have. Please feel free to follow and comment!

Everybody has moments of glory when they are able to defy the odds and bring home a victory, whether figuratively or literally. This is not one of those stories. Rather, this is a story in which pitiful predictions gave way to overconfident delusions. It turns out that no victory, or loss, is certain until the very end. 

When I was int he fourth grade at St. Anthony's Catholic School, I won our class spelling bee. I don't remember a thing about this part of the road to spelling glory, or lack thereof, but I do know that it sent me to the school-wide round, where I would be up against... middle schoolers. I was horrified. Nonetheless, I brought home my little Scripps study guide and we practiced quite a bit, although I didn't think I stood a chance against those eighth graders. My spelling skills were good, but certainly not good enough to beat teenagers.

When teh day came, we lined up in the church (our version of a multi-purpose room) and the entire student body filed in to fill the pews and stare at us. While I'm sure no one was actually interested in the spelling prowess of their peers, but they were happy to get out of their regular classroom routine for a few minutes. There were quite a few watchful parents in attendance, my own included. I was afraid they'd wasted their time, but they could get a picture of me at the microphone once and then go about their day.

My memories of the beginning of the bee are a blur, but I remember the feeling when I realized that each time I went to the microphone, there were fewer and fewer people sitting behind me. It turns out that I was doing okay--well, even. Suddenly, there were two of us left--a middle schooler and me! I let myself start to get a little excited. Then, Stacy missed a word: windowpane. As she said "-pain" I knew I had a shot at winning. After the bell, I walked up to the microphone and spelled the word correctly. Holy cow, one more word and I would win! I suddenly knew that I would be able to do it.

I felt a surge of confidence as the announcer reminded everyone that if I spelled this next word correctly, I would win. I was so confident and wrapped up in that triumphant feeling that when the word caller said something I didn't understand, I was truly shocked. So shocked that I forgot I could ask for the word to be repeated, used in a sentence, or defined. I opened my mouth, and an all but arbitrary string of letters came out. The bell rang, I sat down, and Stacy won. I was completely flabbergasted. The victory was practically handed to me and I lost it.

So I came in second. Second in a school-wide spelling bee for Kindergartners through eighth graders. Overall, not bad for a ten-year-old. I did get to take home a red trophy with a bee wearing a graduation cap. How many fourth graders can say that? In the end, I walked away with a second-place trophy and this lesson: if you don't understand something, for goodness sake... ask!

A Special Object

We have been spending the last several weeks writing personal narratives in my classroom. In the interest of fostering a love of writing, I have been joining them in each assignment and writing during their workshop time. I'm sharing a few of them here as models for personal narrative. They are certainly not perfect, but they're stories from my life. Please feel free to follow and comment!

They look like any other hand-made beads. Small, imperfect spheres made from marbled clay. A hole poked through to string them on a now-tattered yellow ribbon. This necklace appears to be of negligible value, but a handful of people know that it was lovingly made by a grandmother for her young granddaughter. 

My grandmother, Mary Martin, had been ill my whole life. I don't recall her without a cane, walker, or wheelchair, nor do I remember a time when she wasn't weakened by a series of unusual health issues. There was a pituitary tumor and Guillain-Barre, but I was too young to grasp the implications of such diagnoses, too young to know anything more than that she needed to be in the hospital for a very long time. I simply visited or played with the clay her occupational therapist had given her. I'm part of the sandwich generation--one layer of bread for my mother to look after as she was caring for aging parents. I was brought to the hospital and provided a distraction from the seemingly endless days of therapy, which I later realized must have been painful. 

One day, though, Bubba (as I called her) had made tiny blue and green clay beads in a therapy session. She painstakingly rolled them and eventually strung them on a small, shiny yellow ribbon. That ribbon was eventually tied around my neck. I carried them on my wedding day, eleven years after she was taken from us. Someday, I hope to tie them around the neck of my little girl, her great-granddaughter, and tell her of a lady who sang songs, watched plays, and wore sneakers with cows on them in the family room of a home on Rockledge Drive.