"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!".

Is Poe Good or Just Obsessive-Compulsive? You Decide.

People who walk head-down tend to have depressive personalities.

But we also find things. As a kid I profited while walking home from school by picking up treasures: small rocks, bottle caps, a bit of broken mirror, the metal letter O that had fallen off a Ford , a rusty spring, half a comb. Once I found a $10 bill and considered myself the luckiest girl in the world.

Since my hands could only carry so much, I stuck everything in my knee socks. Mom still laughs, saying I came home every day looking like I had big tumors on my legs.

Those who know me well are aware that I have never really grown up. In short, I am drawn to junk like a alcoholic is drawn to scotch.

An observation: When normal people go to the beach they pick up shells. I pick up trash.

Have you read about the mass of plastic (some say it's the size of the United States) floating in the Pacific Ocean? The plastic reacts to sunlight and salt water by leaching BPA into the ocean, poisoning the fish. Marine animals eat it and it clogs their guts and kills them

In keeping with Equal Time Laws: my daughter tells me, “There are only so many things you can freak out about in this world;” my brother Aurelius says environmentalists "just want [him] to put on a hair shirt."

When I walk on the beach, I take a bag and pick up trash, especially the plastic variety. It is way more fun than collecting shells, which always end up stuck in a drawer someplace; I don’t even remember where they came from.

That ocean pile may be the size of the U.S, but its growth has just been slowed a square inch.

But it’s not all sacrifice, folks. Yesterday I also found a golf ball and an unopened can of Dos Equis Beer.

In the olden days, when I took my godchildren camping, we’d see how much trash we could pick up. I’d tell them, “See? This is why Good is more powerful than Evil—one person with a plastic bag can undo the evil of hundreds of people.” And yes, some people would say, “And one person with a bag of trash can undo the good of hundreds of people.” To which I say, then more good people need to discover the joy of picking up trash. Join me, minions! Join me!

When I become Queen of the World, the aristocracy will be those who pick up trash. There will be no unemployment or bored teenagers--they'll all be cleaning up the beaches and parks. Best of all, you'll see beautiful billboards everywhere showing Queen Me saying, Liberty, Equality, Dos Equis.