Of

Tonight, before bed, I quizzed Little One for her vocab test tomorrow. She’s in third grade, and while most of the words seemed her level, there were a couple of unexpectedly tough ones, such as “tsunami,” “psychic,” “cinnamon,” and “cyst.”

It brought to mind one of my most negative early experiences … the first grade spelling bee.

Well, it wasn’t a Spelling Bee per se, capital letters and all, it was more informal, the audience basically being the entire classroom. We were all participating. I remember we all sat on top of our desks, and we threw a bean bag to each other. Whoever got the bean bag, got the word from the teacher to spell.

Before long the beanbag comes my way. My first word! Now, in first grade, if I may be so bold as to brag on my publicly anonymous blog, I was quite the smartie. I was probably third behind this one boy and one girl. The boy I eventually became friends with in fifth grade. The girl I despised because she displaced me as the class authority on dinosaurs.

Anyway, the word my teacher gives me is: Of.

Easy!

Or – is it? Suddenly, I am filled with self-doubt. Of. I’ve heard it hundreds of times. It’s such an unobtrusive, innocent word, so important to sentence structure yet built so that you never notice it.

I suddenly realized I had no idea how to spell it.

I stutter.

I stammer.

Then, my mouth starts moving and I spell my word: U – V. “Of,” I say.

Wrong, the teacher says, quite un-diplomatically. (Are kids “wrong” nowadays in school?) I have to sit back on my chair, out of the game, out of the spelling bee.

It is an incidence that I obviously still recall with some bitterness today. Damn you, of!