In the July 2014 edition of Prompts we asked our readers to respond to: “Oops. I left it at home.” Our sole reader response this month:
The Answer My Friend Is….
The teacher was new this year. She didn’t know me.
“Explain to me why you don’t have your homework ready for me this morning?” my fifth grade teacher asked.
I groped for the words in my mind: “The wind blew it away.”
“Don’t lie,” she said.
I wasn’t lying. I also wasn’t accustomed to being accused of lying. I got mad at her, said something I can’t now recall.
“I’m calling your parents and letting them know you lost your temper–and what you said. I’m going to tell them also that you didn’t have your homework done.”
And she did. When I got home, my mother confronted me. “You shouldn’t have lost your temper with your teacher, and you shouldn’t have said what you said. Now do your homework, and I also want you to write a letter of apology.”
“But . . . ”
“Don’t give me any excuses. Just do what I asked you to do.”
So I redid my homework, and I wrote a letter of apology. More than fifty years later, I still seethe at the injustice. I was good at writing precisely because I couldn’t speak well. It was compensatory, the same way blind people can be extremely gifted musically. Now, I have learned the name of my handicap: Asperger’s Syndrome. It didn’t have a name then.
I walked to my school bus stop that morning, excited about my writing homework. I talked about it. A bully, three years older than me, asked to see my paper. Innocently, I took it out of my notebook and handed it to him. It was a windy day. He pretended to read until the bus pulled up, flashing its red lights and opening its door. Then he let my paper go, and the wind blew it away. I ran after it, but the bus driver yelled, “Get on the bus, kid!”
— Ralph R. Silver Cliff, Colo.
