Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir by Fred Thompson

by Mrs. Eleanor Buckner, mother of one of my high school buddies. Of course, I was outraged. I wanted to know, “What does athletics have to do with school and good conduct, for Pete’s sake?” With this kind of thinking I was ahead of my time. “What about the election? What about just making up new rules to get the results they want? Who do they think they are, the Supreme Court?” I would even have thrown in a “due process” argument if I had ever heard of it. However, it never occurred to me that I had any real recourse. Those were the days before students and their parents filed lawsuits against schools for violation of constitutional or other rights. Besides, I wanted to keep my parents out of it. They knew me better than anybody, and I knew they would be on the teachers’ side. As Mom said, “If you had behaved yourself, this wouldn’t have happened.” I had to consider seriously whether behaving myself would have been worth it. A heavy price to pay, it seemed to me.
    Ironically, it was a teacher who showed me mercy when I needed it the most. Mrs. Little was the mother of another one of my football teammates. Unfortunately for her, she was also my French teacher my senior year. Toward the end of the year, I began to realize that my grade situation was worse than I thought. In fact, I needed to pass French inorder to graduate, and in order to get a passing grade, I had to pass my final French exam. There was only one problem. I hardly knew any French at all. Unlike Latin, French wasn’t a dead language, but it might as well have been, as far as I was concerned. I did think that the French accent of some of those guys in the movies was pretty cool, but that was about the extent of my association with the language. To my great surprise, my survival instincts and natural adaptability failed me, and I failed my final French exam.
    Now things were really getting serious. For the first time in my life, my sense of humor and well-honed “cool kid” nonchalance could do nothing for me. No clever response or prank could get me out of the hole I had dug for myself. The possibility of failing high school had never occurred to me. I had figured that getting a gentleman’s C with no work made a lot more sense than an A or B with a lot of work. Unfortunately, an occasional D or F would rear its ugly head, obviously more times than I had realized. I was distraught.
    One day, as the semester was drawing to a close, Mrs. Little asked to see me. She asked if she gave me my French test over again, or a test similar to it, did I think I could pass it. “Absolutely,” I said. She gave me a couple of days to prepare, and I hit the books with a newfound sense of desperation. This was that second chance that the screwups are always saying they deserve. I knew that there wouldn’t be a third chance. So I passed the test. I never knew why Mrs. Little reached out to me like that. She had never been especiallyfriendly to me before. Maybe she saw some potential in me. Maybe she felt sorry for me. Or maybe, in fact most likely of all, she was dreading the prospect of having me in her class again the following year.
    I was grateful for being given a second chance. But mostly I was relieved—that Mom and Dad would not have to face the shame of seeing their oldest boy fail to accomplish what for them would have been a first: having at least one of us graduate from high school. As with so many things in life, between children and parents, I never really knew how important my graduating from high school was to them until many years later, when my dad went back and earned his own high school equivalency certificate.
    In the end, I managed to graduate from high school with barely enough credits. In our school annual that year, everyone was given a saying or a motto under their photograph. Under mine were the words “The less I do today, the more I plan to do tomorrow.”

 

    W HAT CAUSES a man to dream about the one that got away in