Proverbs 25, Verse 3
"You cannot understand the height of heaven,
the size of the earth, or all that goes on in the king's mind!"
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
In third grade, there was a kid named Ari. You went to school with Ari, too. He had a ton of curly blonde hair and, somehow, defying the predominant mental image you are now conjuring up of him in your mind, he wasn't cute. How you can have your scalp kissed by such golden locks and not be punim-pinchably adorable is an exasperating mystery, but, hey; that's Ari for you.
Ari drooled. That mental image changing yet? It should, because, when you're nine weeks old, drooling's pretty much a given. But no mother or father wants their nine-year-old son going to Mrs. Griffin's classroom wearing a bib. Adding to Ari's increasing list of misfortunes was his lisp, which was just about as subtle and endearing as Truman Capote's.
And, he was chunky. Not fat, per say. Just, you know-- fat in the ass.
As you can maybe see now, all in all, at least outwardly, Ari wasn't quite the prize package, and, sadly, some of his teachers let him know it. While I don't have too many memories of this particular time of my life, I do distinctly remember one moment in third gradery where Mrs. Griffin was showing us some words on butcher-block paper propped up on an easel. She had written the words in austere, thick black Sharpie.
"What's this word?" she asked us, pointing to the word "Determined" with her marker, peering at us from behind her Sophia Lorens. We looked at the word, then we looked back at her. Ari might have raised his hand. Maybe he didn't and she called on him anyway. Either way, she said his name. And he said,
"DEETER-MINDED!"
And we laughed, because that wasn't how you said that word. Looking back on this display, this obviously would have been the moment where Mrs. Griffin sharply admonished us for making fun of Ari, but the way I recall the event, she rolled her eyes, looked at him and said, "Deeter-minded? Really, Ari." and proceeded to call on somebody else who gave the correct pronunciation, while Ari quietly contemplated suicide or, more accurately, said to himself, "One day I will be wealthy enough to buy and sell all of you and you, Mrs. Griffin, will be festering and rotting under the ground onto which I shall gleefully piss while my square-jawed chauffeur warms up the Shiatsu massaging Alcantara-hide throne in the back of my Bentley Mulsanne."
I don't fault Mrs. Griffin necessarily. It's hard to always know what to do and what to say in a given situation, especially when you're an authority figure. I was once the Assistant Director at a summer camp. One of the young girls I had as a camper was a sweet girl with albinism. As with many people with albinism, she had an eye condition called nystagmus, where the eyeballs move rapidly back and forth. She also had extremely poor vision, and so when she read she had the book almost quite literally pressed up against her face. And her hair was the color of straw and her skin as pale as 1% milk. But she was one of my special girls, because, when she was three, my wife had her as a pre-school student, and we had become close with her family. Well, one day, we were rehearsing a scene and another young girl looked over at her and said, "What's wrong with you anyway?"
Instantly, my body temperature soared to 164 degrees and my spine began to sweat. I could have torn that little fucker's face right off with my fingers.
"HEY!" I shouted, my head spinning towards her so fast I thought my neck had snapped, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?! Don't you EVER talk to her like that again, do you understand me?"
The girl bit her lip and I thought she was going to take a shit in her shorts, which she very well might have done. And that would have been alright with me, actually, though I probably would have gotten fired. And maybe I should have anyway. It wasn't a very good conflict resolution strategy, and I certainly didn't mediate in a positive, affirming way that turned it into a "teachable moment", and I don't think I did my flaxen-haired favorite any favors either. But I did what I had to do to stop the situation in its tracks, as I was deeter-minded to do.
And, in that moment, I felt for old Mrs. Griffin, who did wrong by Ari, and by all of us by not showing us the way with grace, skill, and tact. This from a woman who told a room full of nine-year-olds that the most memorable moment of her recent trip to Australia was when "a drunk Koala I was holding peed all over me", so maybe tact, skill, and grace wasn't her thing.
It's not my thing either. Of course, I try. I try to be good. I overcompensate with deference and candied words, but if you read me and know me and have spent any longer than a minute-and-a-half inside a car piloted by me then you know. I can be mean and spiteful and cruel and, if I ran into Ari today, I'm not so sure that I wouldn't say, "Hey, have you learned how to pronounce 'determined' yet?" I'm not exactly sure I was one of the kids who laughed at him, but I'm reasonably sure I was.
Unless, of course, I was very different then.
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