You may have heard the old nursery rhyme about Georgie Porgie. He kissed the girls and made them cry. It strikes a chord in me. Not because I invoked the tears of young ladies with insalubrious advances mind you! Though corrupted in mind I was a gentleman in practice. Well, as much as a high school boy could be during his kaleidoscopic evolution. It was in Mr. Sophie's math class when I made a beautiful young lady cry. Now please reserve your judgment until the end of the story if you are able. I can't for the life of me remember her name so I'll call her Sonja because she had red hair and I had the hots for Red Sonja at the time; Brigitte Nielsen, in the words of the immortal Inspector Gadget, "Wowsers"! Okay okay, so Sonja sat to the left of me in math class and would often help me with, well, pretty much everything math related. I didn't get to kiss her though the thought may have crossed my mind a few million times but what I did get to do is share a short story I wrote. I thought that her analytical ability would be super useful and she seemed excited to assist me. She sat and read while pencils scratched away on nearby equations. I just doodled to keep up the façade that I was actually mathing like the other diligent drones. I'll never forget what happened. An expression rolled across her face like someone killed a puppy. She put her hand over her mouth and placed the story down. Tears rolled down her cheeks. I was perturbed and confused. Then, and quite to my surprise, she hauled off and punched me in the left arm like Muhammad Ali. I kid you not, damn near knocked me out of my desk! I looked at her as if Red Sonja was raising her blade above my head for a fatal stroke, probably as scared as I was smitten, and then she laughed out loud and handed me the story. She called me an “ass hole” and smiled. What did I learn? There were ways to intimately connect with someone without kissing them and I had better be careful when I string words together again and...OMG Sonja touched my arm! She totally wants me!
There are a great many moments in a young mans life that offer contributions to his dreams. Some more substantial than others. I write now to pay homage to one such moment in my life; a moment that first presented itself in the form of an accusation. It was over two decades ago in an overcrowded middle school on the fringe of an old desert town in Miss Froude's seventh grade English class. The assignment, a short story of our own preference and design. Oh how my mind exploded with the possibilities. My hand quivered over the pages in elation. With a white knuckled grip on my number two pencil I immersed myself in the project for almost a week before presenting my final draft with the rest of my peers. On the following day Miss Froude withheld my paper and requested to speak with me outside on the ramp of our portable classroom. I had no idea why I was being singled out until of course she started to speak to me with a grave look on her otherwise lovely face. "Do you know what plagiarism is," she said. To her surprise I smiled ear to ear and replied, "Yes." She attempted an even sterner appearance, "this is a very serious matter." But again I met her with jovial glee. She tried a different tactic and began to highlight words, sentences, and content that she believed were all beyond my meager abilities as a writer. She only made it half way through the story before it appeared that I was going to burst with delight. "Why are you so happy," she finally demanded. In the most respectful tone I could muster I said, "because you're telling me...a college educated woman...that you think my writing is so good that I must have stolen it. This may be the happiest moment of my young life." The look on her face was priceless! I thanked her and said that she would never find a matching story because she held a seventh graders sloppy original in hand. From that moment on I aced almost every English class up to my high school graduation. The funny thing is that being a writer wasn't a dream I permitted myself to have until someone indirectly made me believe I could do it. Miss Froude accidentally offered the greatest contribution to my favorite dream and I will always cherish her attempted rebuke