November 7, 2005

I decided to blow the dust off of my older journals to see what interesting stories I could find.  What surprised me was that there's a story in the handwriting itself.  To be blunt, my handwriting has changed over the years, for the worse.  Words that used to flow easily to the eyes have evolved into scribbles that require some deciphering by the author, myself.  There's a sentence from Januar17th of this year that seems to say, "In the evening, I was terested by smoothly polobatts."  I'll let you know if I ever figure it out.

In my youth, my cursive writing was fairly impressive.  As a matter of fact, I once won an award for it.  Honestly.  My elementary school teacher would send our writing exercises off to somewhere that cared, and sometimes this mysterious somewhere would send back one of the pages with a certificate of excellence.  Perhaps this might not seem like much, but in a time when awards weren't handed out in droves, this was truly an honor.  For the rest of the school year, I beamed with pride every time I looked at my paper award, stapled through the corners to the bulletin board behind the teacher's desk.

As life so often chooses, this story does not end happily.  On the last day of school, I eagerly awaited to take my cherished award home.  Most of that last day was spent as final grade school days usually are - laughing, playing, cleaning out our desks, and saying good bye.  Temptation told me to quietly remove the document from the wall and place it in my stack of papers to bring home.  But my guardians had taught me better than that.  When my patience finally ran thin, I very politely interrupted our teacher from her hallway conversation.  I asked if I might take down my award now.  Having forgotten about it, she thought for a moment, then without making eye contact told me to follow her.  The two of us stood by her desk as she raised her voice above the level of the students, stating that she had an announcement.

I was embarrassed, but filled with pride.  Surely, she was planning on a final congratulations in front of an audience.

That was sort of true.  Instead of congratulating ME, she congratulated the entire classroom.  She then said that the entire class should have received an award since they all had tried so hard, thus in the interest of fairness, she was going to have a drawing for my award.

And she did.

I placed my name in a bowl along with the other students, praying that luck might reward me with what was due.  As I would discover many, many times throughout my life, luck has no awareness of me.  My vision was blurred with tears as someone else jumped and yelled when our teacher called their name, so I don't even have a clear memory of who received the award.  My award, that they acquired through an interest of fairness.

Thinking back to the excited child who won my certificate, whoever they were, I am further grieved by the realization that they most definitely threw it out once they reached their domain.  Their excitement was in the act of winning something, not the award.

Why do I think this?

Because my name was on it.  In beautiful, cursive handwriting.