School Days

Once upon a time, when I was a girl, I corralled my two little sisters into my bedroom and informed them, in the bossy manner of an eight-year old, that we were going to play school. I was, of course the teacher, I told them because I was the only one who went to school and therefore the only one with experience. They would be the students, ok? Ok.

“Welcome to school, Class,” I said. “Please come in and sit down here by umm, uhhh” I looked around my bedroom for a good spot for a classroom, “our bookshelf.”

“Is everybody comfortable?” I asked after they both were dutifully sitting, the first sister with the banged up knees, cross-legged and the second sister kneeling (she was the youngest and, for her kneeling was a landing position that eschewed no particular intent to stay if things got boring).

“Now, what do you want to learn?” I asked them having just discovered that real teachers had a curriculum and I did not.

Stick with me here, dear Reader. That part about the curriculum is relevant to the fact that, as I write this I have no idea what I am doing with this site.

My sisters looked at me and shrugged.

“Ok, well, I should teach you something that you don’t know, so what don’t you know that you would be interested in learning?”

This time they looked at each other and shrugged. I looked across the room. I looked at the ceiling, out the window, and back to my sisters and the books on my bookshelf and there it sat: a dictionary.

“I have an idea!” I said, “Let’s start with learning a new word every day when you come to school.”

They nodded, if not enthusiastically at least willingly and I heard a little voice in my head telling me that this was my calling. I searched around in my head for a word that I knew but they didn’t without much success. Then, the echo of my own words hanging in the air, I looked at my still-baby sister with her fountain-head and innocent little face and said “Idea. That’s a wonderful word. Still-Baby-Sister, do you know what an idea is?”

She thought about it a moment, because that’s how she does, and then she shook her head. One could hardly blame her for not having any idea what an idea was; her age was still in the very early single-digits and when Mom came at you with a hairbrush and a rubber-band, because no one had yet invented the special one for your hair, she made sure it wouldn’t fall out while we were playing and that sometimes made it a little hard to think. I was feeling very proud to have jumped over the first, spontaneous hurdle to becoming a real teacher by finding not just any word but a word so filled with possibility that we would be able to talk about it in our school for a long time.

I drew myself up to my tallest height and orated forth, “Whenever we define a word, we have to describe it without using the word itself. That wouldn’t be fair. So, let’s try it. An idea is… uh, an idea is…”

The little fairy in my head took a snapshot of that moment and handed it to me. She said: “Remember this for there is a good chance you will spend your life in these sorts of situations of your own making…”

Here I am, fifty years later, still fighting the good fight and mostly losing, but never giving up. I have an idea: Let’s wait and see what this site decides to be in the future.