"Happy Birthday"

Everything in first grade was difficult for me.

I didn’t like walking to school, and in nice weather we always walked. I shuffled and whined so much the other kids got behind me and walked hard on my heels. It didn't help. In cold weather we carpooled, but invariably I wasn’t ready when they arrived and Mom had to run out and wave for them to go on and then drive me to school herself.

My teacher was Mrs. Tsetse (pronounced SEAT-see), a thin elderly woman with hair in a bun. Her name terrified me. It sounded a lot like “titties” and I wasn’t entirely sure which was the bad word and which was her name. I had a great phobia of accidentally saying dirty words, so I only spoke her name in the tiniest of whispers. “Lyttie,” she’d scold, ”you need to speak up. We can’t hear you if you don’t speak up.”

They gave us huge pencils to write with, but no erasers. (What hair-brained administrator decided first graders didn’t need erasers?) Sometimes I brought a big eraser from home. Even with this, I made so many mistakes, I ended up rubbing huge holes in the paper.

But not everything was bad. Laura Welch became my friend. You may ask, who was Laura Welch? Only the smartest, most popular girl in class. She was the kind of girl teachers put in charge if they had to leave the room. Amazingly, we always obeyed her, even the boys. (Something about her denoted thoroughbred, like the Kennedy’s.)But she never was smarmy or stuck-up about it. Once she sat at Mrs. Tsetse’s desk and mock-clapped her hands the way teachers do, and everyone laughed. Then we settled down and worshipped her till Mrs. Tsetse got back.

In those days they taught reading by the Sight Method, which meant you had to memorize how each word was spelled. It had been successfully used to teach deaf kids to read and someone apparently decided that if it was good enough for the deaf it‘d work even better for the rest of us. It was a dismal failure, but school districts blindly taught this way for decades. As for me I loved reading and thrilled to learn new words, Sight Reading or not. But my grades were mostly C’s and I always felt second-rate.

Every morning about ten of us would take our chairs to the front of the room and sit in a circle for reading. Mrs. Tsetse held up cards with new words for us to memorize. Then we’d read out loud from our Ginn Basic Readers.

One day she held up a new word and asked us to guess it. Instantly I knew it and raised my hand. Of course, everyone else raised their hands too. Mrs. Tsetse called on one girl; but when faced with giving an answer the kid backed down; she didn’t know it after all. So we all raised our hands again and Mrs. Tsetse called on another kid and then another and another. But nobody knew the word. Finally only me and Laura were left. Obviously wanting to get this over with, Mrs. Tsetse called on Laura. I lowered my hand, disappointed. Laura knew everything; she'd surely get the word. But even Laura Welch sat silent. Then, oh boy, did I raise my hand. When Mrs. Tsetse called on me, I almost shouted, “Birthday!”

“That’s right!” she said. “Now, let’s all sing Happy Birthday.”

Triumph! For the first time in my life, I had bested everyone. I sang LOUD, "Happy Birthday dear Lyttie, Happy Birthday to you!".

From My Journal This Week

Trying desperately to meet the deadline for finishing my novel. Much anxiety.
I ask myself: What are you so afraid of?

The Great Fear:
If I don't do things just right, everyone will discover what a loser I am. I will wake up one night and find the whole town outside my house with flaming torches and pitchforks. They will attack me, beating me with clubs, and drive me into the desert, where I will be forced to exist the rest of my life alone, cast out, with hungry jackals all around.

But what if I managed to find some way to survive?
Perhaps I could befriend the jackals. (After all, a jackal is just a kind of dog, right? And dogs like me.) This would give me, the Big Loser, enormous power. I might become "The Jackal Woman."

Then because once a society creates Losers and Pariahs it cannot survive without them, pretty soon other people will get banished to the desert. There will develop a whole community of us. The Jackal People.

Need I be so bold as to suggest that this has already happened?