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spelling be
October 14, 2004
after my late afternoon pub adventure at Fado's today, complete with the final beer that I swear I didn't order, I decided once again that it was time to take a serious break from drinking.
the buzz from lunch carried me well through the remaining two hours of work. i worked hard, set myself about the hard work of sobriety and being an attorney.
at 5:30, registration began for the adult spelling bee, co-sponsored by the Austin Public Library, the Austin Chronicle, and, um... Fado's. to benefit public libraries. i mean, come on. that's important, right?
ok, aside from that, here's the deal: when i was a kid, i was even more of a geek than i am today. my skills were heightened, supposedly above average, yet balanced between the creative and the analytical. i read voraciously, studied science, but listened to music intently, wrote without restraint or doubt. and in the meantime, i absolutely sucked at anything remotely athletic that other kids my age cared about. all i had was my middle name.
growing up in the schoolyard in the 70's in texas, there were the inevitable debates during recess - who would be roger staubach? who would be tony dorsett? often, the choices were made by virtue of merit and ability. yet, by way of a strange sort of logic or affirmative action, it turned out that because my middle name was "earl," no one would challenge my right to be earl campbell, the simple but charismatic, record-breaking, and wholly inspiring star running back for the university of texas at the time.
but that was my only claim to fame in the world of competition. i was slow, a bit dim in the realm of athletic intelligence and instinct, and entirely inexperienced. i was probably even a bit of a coward, because i would not learn until years later that my body had the ability to take a tremendous amount of impact and punishment without any serious repercussions that a good health insurance plan wouldn't cover. but at the time, i knew only the feeling of being a loser among my peers.
but i could spell. i was good with multiplication, too, but some innate sense of the dramatic and heroic in me realized that math was not the way. spelling was. i'd be the hero, finally, standing bold and upright before the whole student body, the letters falling forth easily, with a confidence and elegance that would at once evoke comparisons to sean connery and superman (rest in peace, mr. reeve...). fifth grade girls would swoon under the powerful spell of my ability to spell "ephemeral."
guys would feel the first true inspiration of their young lives, moved to put aside the shame of their own dimwittedness, and they would stand and applaud as i coolly dispensed the spelling of "herbivorous." they would stand and cheer as if i were indeed the real earl campbell, humbly but determinately running, dodging, breaking tackles on my way to the end zone. "go, rob, go! spell like the wind!" they would cry.
ahhh. my second harp arrived, disrupting the recollection of fifth grade ambition/fantasy. sadly, i'm not in fifth grade anymore. i would have laid waste to my all who opposed me, those so many years ago. today, i'm a guy that catches errors in news wire stories, but who is staking his entire competitive chances on his ability to spell "pharyngeal." of, relating to, or located in, the pharynx. pharyngeal. granted, until just now, i believed it had something to do with fingers, but dammit, i could spell the damned thing.
so, i walked into the pub tonight, arriving immediately at the registration table, where the woman immediately decreed, "wow. you look just like dean cain." i smiled modestly and tried to blush, before using my heat vision to sear a hole quickly and cleanly through the glass donation jar in front of her, switching quickly to my x-ray vision to wittily and accurately inform her that the brazilian wax job was entirely worthwhile for her, and then circling the pub at super-speed, returning to a standstill with 37 empty pint glasses balanced on my hand, and my best flirtatious smile.
she and the bystanders applauded with approval like elementary school students for a mime, then she took my $3.00 entry fee. it's getting so much harder to impress women these days.
i sat at the same table i had eaten at a few hours earlier. it really sort of sucked being alone there, but before long, a crew of hip-looking twenty-somethings joined me: kristen with her cat-eye glasses; mike z., whose name and look made him a shoo-in as a beastie boy; the charismatic and alphabetically adept jennifer johnson; and britt, who sported a shirt that declared "i like high school boys," tucked on the right but not the left, in just the way that, when i attempt it, cries out, "i meant to do this. hey! look at me."
in retrospect, the spelling bee was a blur. i have no idea what happened. there was a piece of paper issued to all the participants, with 20 words. we were to circle the incorrectly spelled words, and the top 50 scores would make it to the second round.
aside from the eventual diminishment of my considerable skills by age and the relentless onslaught of legal thought, i was at a disadvantage, given the vast array of people that i had never seen in fado's before, who for all the world looked as if they only emerged once or twice a year for the spelling bee, who would not even come out for a good star trek convention. my waitress, melody, told me that she had asked one of these new patrons if she'd like anything, and had been told, "oh, goodness no, i can't drink before a spelling test!" many of these walking Cray supercomputers probably used words like "fantoccine" and "oeuvre" two to three times daily, in reference to their work as professors of medieval italian poetry, or their bowel movements.
i had no idea. about, really, anything. i was stuck, armed only with the word "pharyngeal," which went completely unused, and with the vague hope that "adult spelling bee" meant that the hardest word i might get was "phallus."
amazingly, i made the cut to the second round, accompanied at our table by jennifer johnson. but for all my apparent spelling ack... acumm... accumin... errr...
for all my apparent spelling ability, it turns out i'm not so good at reading instructions. the second round is not next wednesday, as i'd thought, but this thursday night. thursday night also happens to be the first game of the new season for my women's basketball team. as their coach, i'm not the lone captain kirk-like heroic spelling bee champion, but just a piece that has something to contribute to the whole. the girls on the team made me a part of what they do - we listen to each other, we struggle together, and last season i was rewarded with being part of an incredible, epic, and inspiring win against all odds for the championship.
fifth grade was a long time ago. i don't want the same things i wanted then - i'm not an astronaut. my luke skywalker action figure is buried in the dirt of what was once my yard, sealed into the past by the concrete foundation of a target greatland. my heart has gone more places since that time than i or my fifth-grade ambition ever could have imagined it would have. last night, there was no struggle or regret with the choice before me.
so, good luck, jennifer johnson. spell like the wind!
Posted by Rob at October 14, 2004 03:03 AM