How could an eighth-grade spelling test have stayed in my mind for so long?  It stays because I cheated.

Spelling was one of my fortes, you see.  For some reason I was fairly good at sounding out words in English, with all their quirkeries, and there was little in what the authorities considered a teen-age vocabulary that I couldn’t spell.  I kept getting that “100%” on my test page, and not everyone did.

The day came when I tired of this, and after due deliberation, hoping to be accepted by others, uncaring what I would think half a century later, I did it.   I deliberately misspelled a word…it was “prerogative.”  I remember the squashed muddy feeling in my heart, when I put down “perogrative,” or another combination of letters I knew would wreck my personal record.  Decided to misspell it, did it on purpose, earn acceptance at last as one of the guys.

The teacher looked at me funny: Are you doing what I think you’re doing? but said not a word and finally frowned at me, puzzled.

That’s the end of my story.  Or it would have been if ever I could have stopped regretting that foolish choice I made in 1950.  Until a few seconds ago, I was the only one who knew what I had done, that I had cut myself down for the sake of being like the rest of the class who occasionally missed a word.

Did it earn me acceptance and respect, becoming one of the mediocre that week?  Not a single atta-boy, you’re one of us and we love you at last, from anybody!

Now what do you know yesterday a friend confided he had done the same thing in a math class forever ago, just plain bored of aceing the field every week.  He regrets it too, every time he thinks of what he did.  If only we had realized we weren’t immolating ourselves just that one day, but vexing us for the rest of our lives!

The only expiation I could invent from then to this day has been to use the word “prerogative” as often as possible, in as many sentences as I can imagine, for so long as I live.  I’d infinitely rather have earned another boring perfect score, and rightly forgotten I ever had an eighth-grade spelling class.

Please share a warning from this latter-day chain-rattling Marley with your bright children.  Point with finger and speak toward them in hush’ed voice: “There but for the grace of the Almighty go thee, dear child!”

Congratulate them as honor their best, no matter what, and thus have no need to feel the doormat, as I do, through all eternity.

The two groups had little to do with each other by choice, but we were forced to share classes with each other, as that was what school was for, after all: training in our common culture.

One class we shared, unfortunately, was Physical Education, and one day a year we were required to take a test with a football, how far each of us could throw it and kick it and how fast we could run with it down a stretch of track.

I had not exactly welcomed the day of the test, as I had just discovered the stories of a writer named Ray Bradbury and much preferred tramping Mars with him than the track with the like of Ricky Conn, the school’s Marlon Brandesque Super-Soche, cocky, confident, and Look Out For Me.

Well described, for clearly he spent more time working out with weights than I spent in the school library.  Girls who loved hard bodies and risk, they loved Ricky Conn.

Came the day of the test, I don’t know why but our regular Phys Ed teacher was absent.  In his place appeared Mister Wood, the bespectacled teacher of Metal Shop, and as I recall, Vice-Principal of the school, as well.  Most everyone liked Mister Wood, and perhaps that’s why Ricky didn’t.

While Mister Wood explained what the rules were for our football test, how many tries we got at each division, Ricky was chattering away to anyone who’d listen.  Mister Wood looked at him once, I recall, a knock-off-the-chatter-please look, which apparently Ricky took for a challenge.

After the teacher said, “Do your best, guys, to throw the ball as hard and as far as you can,” came Ricky’s voice, “Yeah, Teach, I can throw the ball so hard nobody can catch it!” Big confident grin.

Mister Wood took his time, turned and faced Mister King Soche.  ”That’s not true, Conn,” he said. “I can catch any ball you can throw.”

It had been fairly quiet on the field, except for Ricky’s comments, but just then it got awfully quiet indeed.

With everybody else standing there, I watched Ricky as though he were a sudden statue on his pedestal.  He wasn’t a statue.  For a second he froze startled, and then a slow smile spread, as if he couldn’t believe his luck.  The metal-shop teacher, the Vice-Principal — you heard it — was asking for a showdown with the Rickster!

Mister Wood tossed the football to Ricky.  They stood for a moment perhaps twelve feet apart, us slowly backing out of the way, as though the field was a Dodge City saloon and something violent was about to happen.

It wasn’t Dodge City, but it was violent.  Ricky’s smile faded, he lofted the ball a couple of times, gently, getting the feel of it.  He bent down a bit, then whipped upright, shot his arm like lightning and fired a bullet-pass straight at Mister Wood’s chest.

That moment is frozen in my mind, which had set its shutter-speed at a thousandth of a second.  Mister Wood’s glasses went flying forward as the ball hit his chest, snapping his head back.

The ball would have bounced twenty feet from his body had not Mister Wood caught it with one hand, the last force left in it spent in a single little hop in the air before it came to rest in the crook of his arm.

One of the boys stepped over and picked up his glasses from the ground, handed them back.  ”Thank you,” said Mister Wood.

About then my mind ran out of film.  I don’t recall whether anyone applauded, I don’t remember what happened then except we took our test and counted our best of three tries at kicking the thing and so forth.

Mister Wood is long dead.  He was gray-haired before that day, and that day was…let me count… fifty-nine years ago.  I didn’t tell him wow; didn’t know I’d never forget, but I haven’t.

That day Mister Wood showed Ricky Conn and he showed the rest of us what sheer calm courage looks like, close-up.  Wordless teaching: By way of conflict resolution, boys, here’s a bit of what I think being a man might be.

Oh, that’s physical education!  Thank you, Mister Wood.

You may have noticed that this website has grown a bit in the last month or so.  It takes nearly full-time now for me to keep up with the forum, let alone the comments to the posts.

I read your words and I’m floored with the quality of your thinking, the depth of your understanding, and the skill with which you put your lives on a page.

Compelling as you are, yet I need to walk the dogs, more rarely have a crumb to eat, and last of all to sleep.

Please know that I treasure what you say and how you say it, and that in my mind I read and answer just about everything you write.  At the keyboard it’s a different story, I answer only a few.  I spent half an hour assaying poetry after seeing your excellent work, then deleted it for lack of quality…I won’t upload what I don’t myself enjoy.

Point is this: please don’t think I’ve lost interest because I’m not posting or commenting save now and then.  I feel the life-form that is this little family: it’s a current I’ve never felt before.  It’s a script from _Star Trek…_ my old acquaintance Gene Roddenberry would have delighted to visit this place, flickerings of his hope for Humanity coming true.

I take a breath and whisper, _”Who are these people?”_

Does anybody know?  Did you realize that there are others like you in the world?  If this is a teensy-tinesy brand-new website and it already has a cadre of powerhouse souls aboard, can you imagine how many like spirits there must be on the planet today?

– Richard

Not a force, not lines on a cosmic blueprint, not an Akashic Driver chauffeuring me place to place.  More that when I looked back at the disconnected choices I’ve made my life long, I saw a harmony wasn’t disconnected at all.

One day I’d shock at my latest misadventure and ask, “How could I have done such a stupid thing?”  Next year I’d realize, and say, “Thank you, Ahura Mazda for your Light! Had I never thrown myself over those falls I’d never have found this hidden paradise!”

(Of course that paradise had an enchanted river, and the river had a thundering waterfall, and though striving to be sensible I’d slip on my trail and tumble into the river and thence over the falls of what seemed to be foolish choice yet again.)

Now I look back, a resurrected Wile E. Coyote, and I see there was a _purpose_ for every churn and thrash along the way!  Had I not been swept through that experience, it would have been impossible for me to live this one, now — that misadventure was a _prerequisite_  to build the ship I sail today!

So my question: Looking back, can you trace a pattern, do you feel the breath of a Plan in your life, one not lofted on the drafting table of conscious choice?

If you do, is the plan sailing you on Course, or shunting you zigzag to the Sargasso of a meaningless lifetime?

If you sense no Plan, what am I to make of what I see?

Yesterday after they abandoned me, I had a chance to notice the last of the snow on the ground, scattered patterns here and there.  This patch looked like a lion, that like a spaceship, that like an angel with three wings.

I laughed when I noticed that I was using the snow for my personal Rorschach test.

Then I wondered; instead of ink-blots or snow-blots, what if I use the world around me for my test?  This stack of massive logs, I saw it first as a barrier, an obstacle, “Don’t Go Here!”  then shifted it to be a ladder, easy to climb for a clearer view of my landscape.

The path itself, does it represent my own path, I wondered, hard going up hillsides sometimes, curving later around peaceful glades?  Why of course it does…that path is my life!  I’d been walking the same physical road for years, unaware that it stands for my destiny, whenever I choose to see it that way.  Rocks, trees, sky, city, cars, people — the physical expressions, they’re pictures of my mental and spiritual surroundings, as well.

By the time the pups came dashing back to join me, I saw them as travelers with me along our way, not talking but setting an example: what’s wrong with running your path sometimes instead of walking, what’s wrong with letting the destination take care of itself and simply _being,_ for a while?

Pretend every so-called external thing stands for something internal, and what all of a sudden do we understand about ourselves and about our spiritual choice to visit this planet?

If the pups could talk, I’d ask them.  Yet if they could talk, they’d probably say nothing and let me figure it out for myself.

No rules for anybody except post something inappropriate and I’ll delete it and shut down your access. You’ve found what “inappropriate” means after you’ve been deleted.

Since I am fairly prim on coarse language and low-class ideas, assume I’m spring-loaded to the REJECT position, don’t mess with me and everything will be fine. Here’s a guide: so far there hasn’t been a single post on the site that I’ve found less that positive and thoughtful and appropriate for discussion.

Let me or Chris know any problems you have with the forum/discussion pages should you decide to play there and run into trouble.

You can pick up the title of any journal entries from the beginning of the site, if you feel like developing those ideas. Be careful about disagreeing with me, though. I shall allow only a hundred, that is, a single hundred disagreements on any one topic before I’ll begin to consider I might have said something wrong.

— Richard

She listened.  When he paused, frustrated, she said, “Jack, I love you.  Your truthful argument, please?”

His face still dark with anger, her husband all at once relaxed, and laughed.  ”Do you insist?”

She smiled.  ”I insist, sweetheart.”

“Very well,” he said. “My Truthful Argument.”  He leaned against the kitchen counter.  ”Among the many choices available to me, I chose to be upset, just now.  I made that choice because in that moment it seemed to me, and I may be wrong, that you haven’t remembered today is our anniversary.

“However: my greater truth is that you’ve remembered more times than you’ve forgotten.

“However: you are so consistently kind and thoughtful of me in so many other ways, just now I realize that calendars don’t matter.

“My truth, my perception from the huge majority of my impressions and memories, is that you care for me so much you decided to be spending your life with me, no matter I sometimes lose my perspective and my temper, too, from time to time, when I’m frightened I’ve lost your love.

“My truth is I know that not you, not anyone has the power to hurt me or upset me or to anger me but myself, and to the best of my knowledge you have no more tried to hurt me in ten years being married than I’ve tried to hurt you.   And that is never.  You are no more thoughtless than I am.  You’re a galaxy of thoughts!  Both of us, we sometimes think in different directions and that’s OK, isn’t it.   It makes for a rich wide star-field for us to explore together.”

He smiled.  ”And by the way,” he said, “Happy Anniversary.”

She moved close, touched his shoulder.  ”Thank you for telling me your truth,” she said.  ”If you’re hungry, we should probably go to the bedroom.  There’s ten candles in there, burning down.”

————-

The reason I like that little story is the However parts.  For every insult we’d like to hurl when we’re angry, there’s a raft of howevers: “You’re so mean to me!  However, truth be told, you are many more times kind than mean…

“You’re so different from me!  However, to tell the truth, we have a lot more same than different.”

“I hate you!  However, we’ve shared many more warm kind times than hateful and in truth I love you a lot.”

Try it, next argument.  Begin to respond in anger, then add the word, “however,…” and tell the truth you know despite your distress.  See how rage disappears in laughter?

Then it occurred to me, that Jesus the Christ is the first major celebrity suicide that comes swiftly to mind, after Socrates.  If Jesus killed himself, why is it a sin for me to do the same?  Is Jesus a sinner?

It was not so long ago I put it together.  Talking with a friend just retired as a police officer, he shared some stories from his career, his experience with what the police department calls, “Suicide by Cop.”

Some cornered murderer or bank robber is holed up in a house, tracked down and surrounded by police.  ”Come out of the house with your hands up!”

In time he does, hands up, but he’s holding a gun.

“Keep your hands up, drop the gun, turn around and face the wall!”

No response.  ”Drop the gun, please, now!”

Instead, and occasionally with a smile, my friend told me, the man will extend the hand which holds the gun, and point it toward the police.  Whereupon, of course, he collapses in a hail of gunfire.

Later it’s found, sometimes, that the gun was not loaded.  The man chose to die, but he asked the police to do the suiciding for him.

How is this different from the story of Jesus’ death, except that Jesus had perhaps a thousand different opportunities to escape and the criminal may have had three or four?

Jesus chose to die, and asked the authorities to do it for him: Suicide by Roman.  Since when is that a sin?

I’m not the only one who’s wondered about this.  There’s a line by the Judas character in _Jesus Christ Superstar._  Before he runs to “betray” Jesus, he asks him, “What if I just stay here and ruin your ambition?”

Most of Western civilization is so familiar with the story that we think it was essential for Jesus to kill himself.  Not so, of course, as soon as we ask, “Essential for what?”

Essential for the story to turn out as we know it.  Had the story changed, had he decided to repair to France with Mary Magdalen, Jesus would have led a different life, teaching and writing and playing with his children.  And the world would not have had to endure the blessing and the curse of Christianity for the last 2100 years.

Kill himself he did, though, so the story goes.  It was certainly his freedom to do so; I just wonder why so many of his followers consider their leader’s own example to be sinful.  Perhaps after they read this they will change their minds and declare it isn’t.

For this reason, and although I wanted to build an airplane, I knew it wouldn’t happen.  Wouldn’t, that is, until the ultralight flying machines came on the market.

They seemed so simple!  Simple aluminum tubes, simple steel cables, you pop some fabric on the wings, wheels on axles, engine on mount, you’re done!

That’s pretty well the way it worked out.  I don’t remember how many hours it took to assemble my Pterodactyl Ascender, but it didn’t feel like a whole lot.  One day it lay in brown cardboard boxes, long coffins on the garage floor, the next day the boxes were gone and there was a great deal of unrecognizable odd parts on the floor.

Next day it was all still there, me at the kitchen table reading the manual of how it was all supposed to fit together.  Before I knew it, I had finished reading the first chapter of the manual.  The parts were still on the floor.  They stayed there as I began Section Two, “Assembling the Wing.”

A month later, perhaps two months, I was all suited up for the first flight, engine started, checklist complete:  Wings — Installed.  Wheels — On.  Engine — Running.  No brakes but heels dug into ground.  Ready ?  

Since I had built this thing, or at least assembled it, I wasn’t expecting it to fly.  I have assembled a fair number of things: a child’s bicycle, two outdoor tables, a lawnmower, bookshelves aplenty.  None of them flew, so how could this thing of cloth and frail metals do what they could not?

Yet I pretended that what I had assembled was actually an airplane, if a small one, and deserved my best effort.  Such as: Throttle Forward — Lift Feet.

The frail thing was so light…one blast from the engine and it took off, egg from a slingshot.  Not a hundred-feet it was in the air, forest of treetops suddenly below, climbing like an ancient dragon, _flying!_ and bearing me with it!

The cockpit was a little sparse.  I reached for my pencil to make a note on my kneeboard, dropped the pencil and watched it disappear, a thousand feet down.

At two thousand feet I shut the engine down, as the advertisement had said it might be a reasonably good glider.  It was!

Silent save for the soft breeze, we circled in rising air.  Perhaps we didn’t gain much altitude, but for sure we weren’t following the pencil, not at all.

Pitch control so light and sensitive that much more than a touch reared the dragon skyward or plunged it down.  Note to self: fly the pitch control as you would a helicopter’s…just think about climbing and don’t move your hand; that’ll be plenty.

I reached up for the engine start handle, pulled the cord and I had a power-plane once more.  A few turns and stalls, power on power off…what a sweet little machine!

Throttle back, a steep descent to the hayfield, level out inches above the grass and hold off… till the main wheels brush the ground, nosewheel comes down to follow, feet out when I dared, for brakes.

And there we were, engine perking quietly behind me, sounding exhilarated itself — “Want to try it again, boss?”  

Sounded like a good idea.

I can see the smile of my first flight instructor, all cool and unconcerned, pulling the throttle to idle and saying, “By the way, where do you plan to land when the engine quits… as it just did?”

“I guess we’ll have to put ‘er down on the little pointy white place,” I’d say.

But really, between you and me, and if you tilt your computer screen just right, you can see the valley beyond and a field down there that’d be not so hard to slip into and land, get out and stretch our legs, rest a bit from flying.

Like so many threats in our lives, a ferocious foreground distracts from our background security .  It’s fun to be scared, sometimes, but never to fear that our true life can be lost, nor in the slightest danger.