Capital Exception

     My ninth grade English teacher was Mrs. Dye who lived further down the old Route 219 than we did in Boston, New York. Mom knew her husband, Alfred Dye who had an insurance company in town and apparently did business with the law office Mom was working at. And this month, while driving through Boston, having a look around like I always have to do when I'm in Western New York, I saw the Alfred Dye Insurance sign still where it always has been – I wonder who is running the business now?

     One day Mrs. Dye was scolding us about our writing – our skills were not up to the level of what she expected from us. Amidst her criticism, Mrs. Dye said that we had the habit of capitalizing words whenever we felt like it, on whims, rather than following the rules of capitalization. And then she said,

     “You capitalize the first word in a sentence; and you capitalize proper nouns. That's it.”  

        Then she looked around the classroom, caught my eye, and said, with the tiniest bit of a smirk,

     “The only exception is the middle of Denise's last name!”

     I always thought having a capital S in the middle of Des Soye was cool, but that day I did not really appreciate the attention.

     A classmate turned to me and said, “alway have to be special, don't you Denise?”

     And this was so completely ironic – because the classmate accusing me of needing to be special with my name was someone who had always insisted we call her by her nickname which was Muffy! It does not have weird capital letters – buy you have to admit – Muffy is totally special, don't you think?

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