knight poem from?” Then she turned and continued handing out the graded papers as I shrank down in my chair, too stunned to even turn my paper over to hide the terrible grade from the eyes of my peers.
There’s a verse in a song by the group They Might Be Giants that says, “I’ve got just two songs in me, and I just wrote the third.” Well, apparently I had just one poem in me and had faked my way through the second one in a cloud of youthful arrogance and laziness. I never spoke to Miss Patton about the grade and she never spoke to me about my failed parade poem. I was firmly back at square one with her, no longer the boy genius of verse but once again merely the kid who told Teresa Andrews that our teacher looked like the saggy-breasted ape-woman on the evolutionary chart. What one successful endeavor in the arts had erased, failure and hubris had restored to its original luster like a bottle of mental Turtle Wax.
Success had come easily and had vanished twice as effortlessly. I lay in bed that night feeling silly, mad at myself for squandering my reputation, and embarrassed that I had entertained such cavalier thoughts about my abilities and such patronizing thoughts about those of my classmates. Their poems had all been good. They had been sincere and had obviously been written with a fair amount of effort. I imagined how each kid had consulted his or her parents, had sought out advice about what subject to write their poems on, had toiled with finding rhymes, and had then read their works aloud to their pleased families, fielding both suggestions and praise. And while they were all bonding and challenging themselves, I was quickly dashing down a set of nonsense lines I knew deep in my heart were terrible so that I could spend the rest of that evening watching TV and ignoring my parents, sure that I was now far too advanced to need them around anymore.
Like the singing frog found by the construction worker in that old Warner Bros. cartoon, my gift from beyond had ended up ruining my third-grade life. Or at least my much coveted teacher’s pet status. I had shoved a Barbie’s Dreamhouse into my shopping cart and now discovered that I didn’t even have room for a few cheap coloring books of dignity. It was the most humiliated I’d ever felt in my eight years on Earth, and I knew I had to do something to erase my arrogant act.
I got out of my bed and sat down at my desk with a piece of notebook paper. Over the course of the next two hours, struggling with every word and rhyme, I wrote the following verse:
Miss Patton is so beautiful
On this we all agree
She tries to teach us every day
Teach you and you and me
And if there’s something we don’t get
It’s not her fault, it’s ours
That’s why Miss Patton is the best
Let’s all give her some flowers.
I never gave Miss Patton this groveling poem, but it didn’t matter. I had written it and I was awake when I had written it and it was really hard to write and I knew that what I had written was pretty bad. In other words, it was exactly the way I would have done things had my brain not seen fit to curse me with the Knight in Shining Armor poem. I smiled at my ode to Miss Patton, buried it in the bottom drawer of my desk, and went back to bed, dreaming of a shopping cart filled with cheap but still very fun toys.
SCARED STRAIGHT
O ne Halloween, when I was ten, I decided to dress up like a girl.
For the past year, I had been playing around with a long blond wig my mother had in her bedroom. I’d discovered it a few years back while searching for my hidden Christmas presents. During my quest, I peered into the space between my parents’ dresser and the bedroom wall and came across a thick, short blue tube with a picture of a woman’s head on it. I took the top off the tube and found the flowing blond wig inside. It was the exact same style and color of hair that my second grade teacher, Miss Drulk, had when I was in love with her three years
There’s a verse in a song by the group They Might Be Giants that says, “I’ve got just two songs in me, and I just wrote the third.” Well, apparently I had just one poem in me and had faked my way through the second one in a cloud of youthful arrogance and laziness. I never spoke to Miss Patton about the grade and she never spoke to me about my failed parade poem. I was firmly back at square one with her, no longer the boy genius of verse but once again merely the kid who told Teresa Andrews that our teacher looked like the saggy-breasted ape-woman on the evolutionary chart. What one successful endeavor in the arts had erased, failure and hubris had restored to its original luster like a bottle of mental Turtle Wax.
Success had come easily and had vanished twice as effortlessly. I lay in bed that night feeling silly, mad at myself for squandering my reputation, and embarrassed that I had entertained such cavalier thoughts about my abilities and such patronizing thoughts about those of my classmates. Their poems had all been good. They had been sincere and had obviously been written with a fair amount of effort. I imagined how each kid had consulted his or her parents, had sought out advice about what subject to write their poems on, had toiled with finding rhymes, and had then read their works aloud to their pleased families, fielding both suggestions and praise. And while they were all bonding and challenging themselves, I was quickly dashing down a set of nonsense lines I knew deep in my heart were terrible so that I could spend the rest of that evening watching TV and ignoring my parents, sure that I was now far too advanced to need them around anymore.
Like the singing frog found by the construction worker in that old Warner Bros. cartoon, my gift from beyond had ended up ruining my third-grade life. Or at least my much coveted teacher’s pet status. I had shoved a Barbie’s Dreamhouse into my shopping cart and now discovered that I didn’t even have room for a few cheap coloring books of dignity. It was the most humiliated I’d ever felt in my eight years on Earth, and I knew I had to do something to erase my arrogant act.
I got out of my bed and sat down at my desk with a piece of notebook paper. Over the course of the next two hours, struggling with every word and rhyme, I wrote the following verse:
Miss Patton is so beautiful
On this we all agree
She tries to teach us every day
Teach you and you and me
And if there’s something we don’t get
It’s not her fault, it’s ours
That’s why Miss Patton is the best
Let’s all give her some flowers.
I never gave Miss Patton this groveling poem, but it didn’t matter. I had written it and I was awake when I had written it and it was really hard to write and I knew that what I had written was pretty bad. In other words, it was exactly the way I would have done things had my brain not seen fit to curse me with the Knight in Shining Armor poem. I smiled at my ode to Miss Patton, buried it in the bottom drawer of my desk, and went back to bed, dreaming of a shopping cart filled with cheap but still very fun toys.
SCARED STRAIGHT
O ne Halloween, when I was ten, I decided to dress up like a girl.
For the past year, I had been playing around with a long blond wig my mother had in her bedroom. I’d discovered it a few years back while searching for my hidden Christmas presents. During my quest, I peered into the space between my parents’ dresser and the bedroom wall and came across a thick, short blue tube with a picture of a woman’s head on it. I took the top off the tube and found the flowing blond wig inside. It was the exact same style and color of hair that my second grade teacher, Miss Drulk, had when I was in love with her three years
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