If you’ve read the others in this series, you will know what I am not repeating in this block. But the space is part of the page design, so I’m self-obligated to fill it with something even if it is just jabber.

Remember my writing, ¹Hope you recognize ‘writing’ is a gerund and requires the possessive ‘my’ instead of me. “Can’t read this, Benson, do it over.” Along with the “F” it, or something like it, was often scribbled, yes scribbled, at the top of many of my papers by Mr. Doitover my freshman English teacher. He and Miss Doitover, to be mentioned later, were not related.

Would you believe I disconnected my brain from my mouth again? My nearly nonagenarian memory does not tell me if it was on purpose, or just a bad habit of my youth.²There is some evidence it didn’t totally stop then.

Mr. Doitover had us read a Shakespeare piece and write what we thought he, Shakespeare, meant by what he wrote.

I don’t remember what the piece was or what I wrote in response to the teacher’s instructions. I didn’t get the ‘can’t read’ note but I did get the “F” with a note something like, “That is nowhere close to what he meant, and you may do it over for a passing grade.”
You can probably guess which option I took.

I got stupidly bold and said something like, “Mr. Doitover, you said we should write what we thought the author said. I did what you told us to do. Do you know what Shakespeare meant because you met him in person and asked him what he meant?”

Yup! I had the first of several official visits with Mr. H.S. Prin. I already knew him from delivering his morning newspaper when I was in junior high.

I also knew Mrs. H.S. Prin who was one of my JH teachers. That’s a story too – probably next.

In repeating what I said before, I declare that there is no need to make this opening a repeated, redundant, restating, saying again of the prior first four in this series, but, like in many of my oral speaking activities, I still feel obligated to fill space with something. If silence were golden, I’d be broke!

My inattention or indifference set my junior high math grades. I liked math and it was relatively easy for me, but I had a habit of just not turning in papers or just not doing homework. I felt that there was no reason to do analytical reasoning as applied to story problems or put answers on a worksheet when there is a good fiction book to read. Good quiz scores and a final test saved my C for the year.

I fully expected to be in the algebra class when I entered my freshman year. Then I shot myself in the foot! Well, my mouth was not fully connected to the marginally developed commonsense part of my brain, so my mouth shot me in the foot.

I don’t remember the details, but in a conversation with my math teacher, in response to something he said, I called him Morris instead of Mr. Hislastname. Morris is my middle name, but no one called me John in those days.

It shouldn’t be hard to imagination to know how that went over with him. I’m sure it may have been different if it was a one-on-one, but there was a small group of other students there.

His reply was something like, “Benson, I think you need to get to know Mr. J.H. Principal a little better. Mr. J.H. Principal introduced me to Mr. Custodian, and he introduced me to a two-foot-wide floor mop. He demonstrated how to use it with a four-food wide mop, but I dry mopped the girls’ and boys’ gyms after school with the narrow one.

That, however, wasn’t the real impact of my inability to control my mouth. I was not allowed to take first year algebra and was told by the scheduling counselor that Mr. Hislastname considered me too immature for that level of mathematics.

So I segwayed into high school a year behind the four-year college entry sequence in math.

Dring my many years in the classroom, I got in trouble many times, but some trouble had a long-lasting good outcome. There is no need to make this opening a repeated, redundant, restating of the prior four, but I feel obligated to fill the space with something.

Ah – junior high school. Remember I wrote about the teacher who said I cheated on a spelling test – twice? And I mentioned a positive reward to come later.

She was still in the hallway chastising a student for running when an eraser whizzed across the room. The target picked it out of the air as if catching a baseball. Even in junior high, he and the first thrower were known for their sports ability. The first thrower caught the return, changed hands, and fired it at me. I ducked and the eraser bounced off the wall onto the floor next to me.

I should have left it on the floor, but what junior high boy could have done that? I picked it up just as the teacher entered the room. My arm wasn’t cocked to throw it, and I don’t remember my intent, but she said, “Benson! To the office!” She scanned the room as if looking for a thrower. The room was as silent as it would be during a spelling test.

The original target raised his hand, as I was leaving, saying, “I threw it back to …”

I learned later that she said something like I saw you catch it and it was probably instinct to do what you did. And the original thrower didn’t nor did anyone else say it wasn’t me who threw the first one. Parents of both boys were far higher up on the community social scale. ¹Don’t consider this a woe is me comment – that’s just the way it was.
Nuff said!

I assumed then and now I was assigned yea gifted to a different teacher at Mrs. now I gocha’s request. But my new teacher taught me about gerunds and graded my papers more on content than poor handwriting and misspelled words.

The one who missed me with his throw told me later that he wished he’d been transferred also.

Other than transfer me to the different teacher, I don’t remember what the principal did, but I had a visit or two later.

I think my title implies, “I think, therefore I am.” 1”cogito, ergo sum,” René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 1637 I’ve never read the source, but I know I exist, because I see me every day – the mirror tells me so. In my youth, I was often asked, “Just who do you think you are?” After seeing myself every day, I’m sure I think I am really me. But just because I exist, do I really think.

In proving who I am to the DOL for an enhanced driver license I had to show proof of existence and residence documents. ²It was the same for being permitted to vote.

My Social Security number was required for the enhanced license, but the DOL wouldn’t take my word that I had it memorized and current SS cards do not show a person’s SS number. ³Well it is now a Medicare account card. I had to make a second trip to prove to the DOL clerk that it was printed on the card that it could not be used for identification.

It is worse for a married woman who was divorced to prove identification – they also need proof of their first marriage, proof of divorce and proof of second marriage, etc.

Kawo! I think I got off track as I often do.

Well, I wonder now if wondering is within thinking parameters. I’ve often said I wander as I wonder, so is wandering through and around a topic thinking. If so, I do think and therefore I must be.

I‘ve wanted to read some books over, some I have not. It’s taken me months to get through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A short History of Private Life. I’m sure I will finish it someday. I use Bryson’s A Writer’s Guide to Getting it Right fairly often, but that’s not a re-read. I never finished Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, but I read his A Walk in the Woods twice.

Good writers get a reader into their work in an opening paragraph or at least in the first few pages. I read Henry Gregor Felsen’s Hot Rod (1951) several times when I was getting interested in cars. Weren’t all teenage boys in the 1950s interested in cars?

The first paragraph of Hot Rod grabbed our interest.
“Bud Crayne rounded a curve at fifty and faced into the setting sun. For the next ten miles the highway ran straight and level across open farmland. Ninety-nine out of a hundred drivers rounding that curve and coming onto the flat immediately increased their speed. Bud held at fifty. He had his reason for staying at fifty. Bud always had a reason for driving at a particular speed.”

Felsen set the hook with the first line of the second paragraph.
“A new green Plymouth sedan came up behind Bud, honked imperiously and swept by.”
What do you think was going to happen?

Why do I mention Bryson and Felsen in this post? Bryson starts his book At Home: … with:
“In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul’s Cathedrals.”
Maybe, perhaps, or possibly a 1950s teen would continue reading, but I think not – I would not have.
Even as a soon to be nonagenarian, I wonder what a giant greenhouse had to do with the title At Home: … but kept reading out of curiosity.

In my own writing, I’ve struggled with my point. Both Bryson and Felsen knew for whom they were writing.

I have a copy of another of Felsen’s Street Rod (1953). Not the one I read in 1954. I bought it for a dollar or perhaps fifty-cents at a garage sale in Vancouver, WA. Ironically, it is a ‘discard’ from Kelso High School Library, but I didn’t see it there when I was teaching there in the 1990s.