Greetings:
While laying in bed this morning listening to the radio on the alarm
clock (which was supposed to force me to get up, not lay there and listen), I heard
the speaker talking about some kid in grade school who had it all. He was the smartest
kid in the class, wore all the trendy clothes, was a good athlete, was the teacher’s
pet, etc. We all knew one of these guys (and probably some of you WERE one of these
guys). It brought to memory a kid I once knew.
This kid, I’ll call him David
(because that was his name), was the uberstudent of my kindergarten and grade school
classes. David aced every test, always stayed inside the lines when coloring, could
answer any question the teacher threw his way, and even did the best eraser cleaning
job you ever did see. To top it off, he was humble (as humble as a grade-schooler can
be, anyway). For a while, he and I were pretty good friends. Trust me, I was no threat
to his dominion.
Anyway, just about the time I thought that David was the perfect
human being, a life-altering event occurred. In first grade, I was standing in line
behind him for my turn to sharpen my Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil, when I noticed that he
was taking an awfully long time to sharpen his. At first, I figured that the most perfect
way to sharpen a pencil was to do it slowly. After all, if David did it that way, then
surely there could be no other way. Determined to emulate his method, I bend around
to watch.
What I saw floored me. He was turning the pencil sharpener crank with
one hand while twisting his pencil in the hole in the same direction at the same rate!
Einstein Jr. could probably have derived Maxwell’s equations at the ripe age of six,
but he couldn’t sharpen his pencil! The image has been emblazoned in my memory for lo
these many years (about 40 of them – I’ll be 48 next month). A great burden was lifted
from my shoulders that day, since as I politely demonstrated to my young friend the
proper way to sharpen his pencil, I knew that there was at least one thing I knew that
he did not.
David and I didn’t hang together after elementary school, even though
he and I went to the same Jr. high and high school. The next time I talked to him was
probably about 11th or 12th grade, around 1975 or so. By then, he had joined the hippie
crowd and had a very large white-boy afro hairdo. The people he hung out with were known
druggies, so I was left to assume he, too, indulged. I don’t know how he faired academically
by then, but he was not a notable figure at graduation (neither was I of course, but
I was never notable). Funny how much things can change over a relatively short time,
n’est ce pas?
One last thing. Our esteemed T&M Forum moderator, RFTEJerry,
whom I once worked with, used to comment matter-of-factly (and hilariously, I might
add) how a lot of really smart people can solve any problem on paper, but sometimes
were likely to P*** their pants because they didn’t have the common sense to get up
and go to the bathroom. No offense intended to the PhD’s in the audience. It just makes
some of us feel a little better about ourselves.
