Free Writing, Week One

*response to classroom prompt--moment when you felt awkward for your parent(s)

Errata

In fourth grade--a few months after donning a bright blue cast on my left leg that made me look cool, but before the chicken pox ordeal of spring--my dad walked into my math class to bring me roses on Valentine's Day. It was the handwritten card that made me blush for him. My dad signed his name to report cards--to everything--in print. EmmetT WhiTE--a cross between bell hooks' unconventional John Hancock and a first grader's. On notes to school, permission slips, and cards attached to Valentine vases, caps cropped up mid-word or at the fronts of words like At or LatE. Or LoVe.

Those rogue caps seemed magnified, making a spectacle, in my eyes, of my dad's unrecognized flaw, making him somehow vulnerable. There were things he should know, but didn't. That's what pricked me most. That's why I folded that card up like a paper fan and stuffed it in the back pocket of my Levi 505's.

People notice big things, making them spectacles because they're big. Think of Bigfoot, monster trucks, the fattest woman on earth, or General Sherman, the 3,000-year-old redwood in California's Sequoia National Forest thought to be the "largest--and oldest-- living thing on the face of the earth" (Burnam). But the large "V" squeezed between the "o" and "e" represents a different phenomenon altogether. Like my dad in a room filled with grammar school boys, the mid-sentence caps are out of place, mutinous, defiant, disturbing. Suggesting chinks in the painstaking onslaught of grammar drilled into our psyches from the time we can read "See Spot run."

The grade-school mantra "We have rules for a reason" brings to memory the perils of casually discarded gum, fights in the hall, or running with scissors. But the alphabet never hurt anybody. For the guardians of grammar, distinctions separate the dangerous from the rebellious, pitting the hard-nosed headmistress with a pointer, horn-rimmed glasses, and a scowl against the quaint protests of a young man, all grown up, finally beyond her reach. Playing with her rules.

Driving too fast, beaming baseballs at base runners, or choosing on a whim which side of the road to drive on can get you killed. An omitted comma might put you under suspicion. But THe rules goVerning caps only threaten to give or withhold reverence to nouns like the united states, Bumper Cars, or oliver twist. Maybe my dad didn't know better. Or maybe he didn't care.

No matter. I don't think my classmates were playing grammar police that day, anyway. As soon as my dad closed the door on my math class, Sherry Wier grabbed the sleeve of my Member's Only windbreaker to whisper breathlessly, "That's your dad? He so fine!"