The Dumb Kid

It’s pretty clear that except for playground fights and other wildness, my middle years at Oxford were a little boring. Mrs. Rattigan was a swell second grade teacher who never slapped me or anything. She did get really mad at me one day when I basically didn’t do a damn thing all day. Why not? It was kind of weird.

I’d come in that day feeling fine. I sat down in my usual seat. Mrs. Rattigan had written like 30 sentences on the board and was explaining what we were supposed to do. It was at that moment my brain just went blank. The only thing I remember Mrs. Rattigan saying was, “did everybody get that? Good! Start your work.”

Ok, so I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I just sat a while and goofed around with my desk, my pencil, and the people sitting around me. The one thing I refused to do was ask anyone what I was supposed to do with those 30 sentences. So after an hour, there I was with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and a scowl that had been baking and hardening for about 45 minutes.

By lunch time, everyone but me had moved on to math. After lunch, my paper still blank, Mrs. Rattigan walked up to my desk, bent over and whispered menacingly, “Roger. If you didn’t have to catch the bus, I would keep you after school.” After all that time, how could I tell her I just didn’t know what to do?

I continued to just sit there, hoping I could just drag it out until 3:00. I know. It makes no sense. Only to a dumb kid. Mrs. Rattigan had moved my seat to keep me quiet. She sat me next to Janet Murphy, a nice girl who everyone liked. She must have figured out my problem because she shook her head and just said, “Just copy the sentences! Isn’t that easy?”

All I had to do was copy the sentences off the board. It was like handwriting practice or something. Jeeze, I don’t know. All I knew – and remember well now-was that it was a hard, hard dumb day for a dumb kid.

Stories to come: The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedy Assassination. James Bond. The Teacher who Told us we could All Go To Hell.