Back in the day – the day being
the mid-sixties, when on good a day I was aspiring to be a mediocre student at
Bethel Park Senior High School – I couldn’t wait to be free of the English
teachers who went into paroxysms of disgust at the first sign of a comma fault,
a dangling participle, a missing word or some teensy-weensy spelling error.
The
other day – that day being Monday – I was disappointed to discover that at least
one English teacher has mellowed.
It all started a few days
before when Jim, a resident, approached me at dinner and said Dennis, the bus
driver, had given Covenant Woods his two-week notice.
“A couple of the ladies asked
me to put something together for him,” Jim said. “I told them, ‘I’m no writer,
but I know someone who thinks he is.’ Would you be willing to write something?”
I told him I would be. And I
did, to wit:
Dennis,
For greeting us with smiles;
For driving all those miles;
For trips to the Dollar Store,
Publix, Wal-Mart and many more;
For being on time for our doctor appointments
So we could get pills, shots and some
ointments;
For taking us to Friday lunch
And making sure we were a happy bunch;
For always offering a helping hand;
For making even gray days grand;
For a thousand big and little favors;
For your friendship that never waivers;
We thank you, and just want to say,
You sure do brighten every day.
Well, not exactly to wit. It
was more like half-wit, or nitwit. You see, when I finished the poem, I read it
over many, many, many times until I was satisfied there were no embarrassing
errors. Then I printed it up, waited until Dennis was out driving the bus, and
took the poem to Shirley at the front desk. She said she’d show it to Jim, and
if he liked it, she’d make a copy on colorful paper.
Apparently, Shirley and
Jim enjoyed the poem. And at dinner Monday, Jo, who had concocted the idea of
writing something for Dennis, went around the dining room asking residents to
sign the fancy-schmancy sheet of paper with the poem on it. Eventually, she got
to me.
If I learned anything in my
ten years with the Star Beacon it was
that the easiest way to spot mistakes in my game story was to read it in the next
day’s paper. A misspelling that had escaped my notice when I repeatedly read
the piece the night before would jump right out of the paper and choke me as I
drank my coffee. The instant Jo handed me the poem to sign, my stupidity became
apparent – or more than normally apparent, some might say. The flaw in my gem
was suddenly so obvious it might as well have been printed in bold type – seventy-two
point bold. In the last line I’d typed “brightened” instead of “brighten.”
“Jo, I made a mistake.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m a
retired English teacher. I noticed it right away.”
“I’ve saved it on the
computer. It will take me two seconds to fix it.” I said. “Shirley is still
here. I’ll be right back with a good copy.”
“But almost everyone has
signed this,” she said. “It will be OK. No one noticed. Nobody said anything.”
So it turns out, forty-seven
years after walking across the stage with my diploma from BPHS, I’ve met an
English teacher who says, as I did in 1966, “So what? It doesn’t matter. No one
will notice. Nobody cares.” But in 2013, I’m convinced that it does matter, that
people will notice, that they will care and that they will pass me in the hall
and whisper to their friends, “That guy doesn’t know ‘brighten’ from
‘brightened.’ What an idiot!”
Oh, where are all the
fastidious, persnickety, never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition,
never-split-an-infinitive English teachers when I need one?
