MARBLES, ORTHOGRAPHY, AND ARROGANCE

She cheated. She must have. Perhaps Mrs. Belcher, our 4th-grade teacher, in an act of premature feminist activism, slipped Bonnie Belle the contested words the night before the 1956-57 Central City [KY] Grade School Spelling Bee. Surely I was sick at home, so the competition was down. Cousin Kirk Stone, later a PhD, and political editor of the Fort Wayne, IN, daily newspaper and later on the U.S. Senate staff of Sen. John Glenn and now professor of communications at Charleston College, came in second. He never forgave Bonnie Belle her luck. Not even Charles Frank Winkler, who would become an oncologist and surgeon, could beat the advantaged competition that day. He must have been preoccupied with his Elvis the Pelvis imitations.

Fifty years later, Bonnie Belle stills gloats over her triumph. Not that I care, but when I saw her last, I wanted to test her orthographic acumen by quizzing her on the word “charlatan.”

One reason I did not win the Spelling Bee was that I was concentrating on the highly coveted school marbles championship. The mental discipline it requires to devise on-the-spot winning marbles strategies is suited for only the most superior exemplars of humanity. Marbles is a cerebral sport. It’s gruelingly physical, too. The kneeling and crawling on the Good Earth and pacing around the marble ring eyeing and calculating all possible trajectories, collisions, and caroms—not to speak of tactics to psyche the competition—is part Zen walking meditation and part bullfight, with the only weapons the brain and opposable thumb and curled index and middle fingers. Marbles is a masculine primal sport.

I won that day and went on to finish runner-up in the county marbles tournament to a boy who went on to win the State championship, in Louisville. I know because my father was in charge of the county championship, for the American Legion, and took the winner to State and then to the Nationals, where the boy finished fourth. In my losing to a marbler who finished fourth in the Nationals--those were my glory days.

I know my loss to a champion marbler at the county championships was due to my concentration wavering that day under Sputnik skies, not for fear of the Russians, but because of the eerie prescience I experienced of one day standing before Bonnie Belle half a century in the future and hearing her declare that spelling is a patrician contest not for those plebeian marblers who sport soiled knees. I want to ask her whether she can spell “haughtiness.”

Mrs. Belcher always liked Bonnie Belle better. I’ll take my marbles and go home.

REMEMBER (AND RECONSTRUCT) WHO YOU TRULY ARE

I want to touch on memory and uses it can be put. This is theory, but out of theory comes everyday behavior, thus it would be useful to us all, certainly to me, as I think and write about it. Let me add that I, like most everyone, have been troubled by unpleasant memories. Let's examine.

Memory, or recall, is problematic, as is everything in Psychology, but one leading strain of thought is that what we call "memory" is NOT some stable collection of mental representations stored away in a brain storehouse waiting intact to be called forth. They are not fixed forms. Instead, memories are imaginative reconstructions of what we experienced in the past. We reconstruct the experience in the present context consistent with our present uses. We are mining the past to reconstruct the present. Memories, then, are plausible stories that we construct NOW to be useful now.

For example, one use I put to memories is to reconstruct an interesting life. I would say that a significant part of this is that I have CHOSEN to reconstruct an interesting life because it suits my present purposes. I could reconstruct--using the same life experiences--a life of stupid moves! For example, while in Bolivia and Peru, because I had read a sensationalist book--Eric von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods--I thought it would be interesting to visit the Nazca Lines, those mysterious markings in the coastal desert of southern Peru. The problem was that we were in Puna, Peru, on Lago Titicaca, and the Andes Mountain range lay between! So, what do I propose to do?--well, rent a jeep and driver and just drive across the mountains! Guess what?--no roads!

So, there are two ways to tell the story: The one of adventure, picking our way around boulders and past wild herds of the exquisitely graceful guanaco, in the wild-flowered altiplano meadows, at 13,000', where no humans live (and certainly don't drive jeeps!); or the story of collossal stupidity.

To conclude the story: We survived after some days, descending down to the salmon-hued, volcanic city of Arequipa. (And, the Nazca Lines on the desert floor were a complete non-event. Oh, well.) My ex-spouse likes to remind me of my occasional lunacy. I prefer and choose to recall the telling of adventure. Both are true. Only one gets told.

The reconstruction of memory can hopefully help us see from where and how far we have come--but, it is our call to interpret. We could choose to recall happy memories which conform to our purposes as a presently happy person. As I like to say--It is never too late to have a happy childhood. And, my reconstruction of interesting experiences seems to validate FOR ME that I have some worth. (I've had doubts.)

Each of us remembers and reconstructs for our own idiosyncratic purposes. I just hope you don't recall and reconstruct to justify to yourself that you are unworthy or undeserving of present happiness and blessings.

Perhaps the best recollection, if we could remember back to before we were born, is that we are all Children of God. Now, that's a good memory.

DARK CATHEDRAL RAT

He was diminutive Jesus, the sot, who lived in the clearing in the rain forest near Sixaola, Costa Rica, south of Limon, and who kept, after successful hunting trips, a skinned, fly-covered whole tepesquintle (a very large, wild “mountain rat") hanging above his hearth slowly desiccating into rat jerky, and where directly below he kept a pot of black beans perpetually cooking which he generously offered his infrequent visitors. I, the vegetarian, ate happily (of the beans), gazing across the clearing into the dark understory of the cathedral-like rain forest trying to avoid thoughts of the half-roasted, half-raw rat carcass guarding my meal.

Jesus related to me the story about his losing his dog. They were out, the two of them, hunting rain-forest game, such as the tespesquintle, when Jesus heard an awful yelp from his hunting companion ahead. He found his pet wrapped against the trunk of a large tree by a huge boa. His machete soon released the dead dog and the serpent never enjoyed its last supper.

A year later, after I returned to the U.S., I learned that diminutive, dogless, desiccated Jesus, the sot, fell off one of the always-wet, precarious single-log bridges I teeteringly crossed in that part of the Costa Rican rain forest. He was found facedown in the swirling stream, his body finally hydrating, under the dark, unforgiving, dripping cathedral canopy of death.

RIDING THE RIO NAPO

Many of my life experiences I can--and do--couch as adventurous and exotic, even when they were quite miserable. Like the time I traveled down the Rio Napo, in Ecuador, in a dugout canoe. It was the regular river transportation and carried people and pop/sodas. Immediately upon boarding the ten-person canoe, they passed back to everyone an empty, metal coffee container. I thought it was to use as urinal. But, no, it was for bailing out water that soon collected in the bottom of the boat, due to the nearly constant rainfall. (We were in rain forest, after all.) I kept looking for piranhas in the opaque river just inches away! How fun was that?

BOYHOOD BRAVADO

I can only resort to movie images, like West Side Story, to access any schema in which to relate to male adolescence in New York City. I'll have to imagine taking the fast elevator to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, as I have daydreamed since childhood, to look out upon any New York boyhood cityscape of doing and daring. An adolescence in Brooklyn, or in any large American city, was a world away from mine.

Or, was it? Actually, it's archetypically similar: boyhood games of hard-fought competition and daring, whether in the street or field; running/cruising the city or town until near collapse; fights, friendships, and so on. Small town or big city, we were still prototypical American boys with much the same influences and responses--no matter the locale--and the essential characteristics of a boyish and, yes, puerile nature.

Did I tell about the time several of us boys were sitting on the eave of the barn behind ole Mrs. Shelton's house, like a line of crows, gazing down at the distant ground wondering what it would be like to jump off the tall roof? Wasn't this a productive way to spend some boyhood morning? We were having a vigorous Heckle-and-Jeckle discussion about this important topic when my feet suddenly slipped quite cleanly out from under me and I hurtled to the ground and made a perfect, uninjured, landing--by accident! Acting totally self-assured and stouthearted, as if it had all been planned, I swaggered and looked up at the others, who were both amazed and aghast at my apparent bravery, and I called out, "What's keeping you little chickens from jumping?" I played it like I was the most courageous boy since ancient Sparta. I was the Philistine warrior challenging and humiliating the Israelites (before Boy David appeared and Goliath was felled), calling each boy by name--"Pat Franklin, jump, you little chicken!"

This became part of my local reputation--Lee the Daring--even if it came by accident. I wasn't about to say otherwise.