Fred the Gardener

       As mentioned earlier, in eighth grade English, I had to do a three minute talk in front of the class as part of my final. I was so mortified that I briefly thought of taking a zero in order to avoid it. But finally I talked myself into memorizing a few lines of The Song Of Hiawatha by promising myself that I would never ever again have to go through such an ordeal. It did not occur to me that it was unrealistic to assume a teacher would never want us to get in front of the class again – or if it did occur to me, I told myself at the time of the promise to take the zero when it happened the next time.

       So you can imagine my despair when I found out in ninth grade English that we would be giving monthly talks to the class! I could not take a zero for each of 10 months! What was I going to do?

       Well, Mrs. Dye said the topics of our talks could be on anything of our choosing. That should have made me feel better, right? But I was angry, mad at the whole world for forcing this upon me. I decided that my topics would be goofy – the goofier the better – that would be fun for me (to see how much I could get away with) and perhaps by being goofy, it would be easier to stand in front of the class and deliver my speeches.

       My talks went over very well. They weren't such that the kids couldn't wait to hear what I had to say every month, but I was not aiming for that. My goal was for things to be as painless as possible.

       One month I talked about Hawaii – not goofy really, but totally random. Another month I gave a speech about coconuts – yeah, that one was kinda silly. Another time I talked about bats – the mammals, not the baseball sticks. Mrs. Dye asked if I would do my bats talk for the parents at Open House one night! This was not going as I had planned – she was supposed to be irritated at my choice of topics – she was supposed to realize from my speeches that she should not be putting terrified students through such ordeals. But Mrs. Dye did not get it – she liked the bats speech so much she thought it would be cute to give it to the parents. Mom and Dad thought so too.

       Jeepers.

       Finally, toward the end of the school year, I decided to do a speech for the class about my brother, Eric. At that point in time Eric was nine years old – and he had written some poems. So I gave a brief talk about Eric and then recited some of his poetry. The one I still remember after all these years was Eric's poem about fall: the leaves are orange and yellow and red/who rakes them up?/his name is Fred.

       When I finished the talk and the poem, the rich kid in class raised his hand and asked if Fred was the gardener? I lashed out at the rich kid, “Do I look like my family has a gardener? Fred rhymes with red – that's who Fred is!”

       Despite the successes of coconuts, bats, my brother's poems, and my snitty I'm not in your clique so please continue to pretend I don't exist outburst, I was still hoping against hope that ninth grade would be the end of the forced speeches, but something inside me was saying that this was probably not the case.

209 20150728 Fred the Gardener