Sixth-grade was a remarkable year for me. I discovered continental drift and wrote a #1 hit. Really. Well, sort of. The first was in fact a true discovery. I was "silent reading" during the dummy-reading class. The five or six of us would place chairs in a circle with Mr. Robins and read from whatever painfully old text it was, something like Old Yeller, and we'd take turns stumbling aloud over incredibly difficult passages like the following:
We called him Old Yeller. The name had a sort of double meaning. One part meant that his short hair was a dingy yellow color, a color that we called "yeller" in those days. The other meant when he opened his head, the sound he let out came closer to being a yell than a bark.
I hated it. I was always terrified I'd mispronounce some difficult word, like "meant" as Me-Aunt and everyone would laugh. "Ha, ha, ha--you sound so British. Me aunt! Me aunt! Me aunt!" The only silver lining was that Kelly wasn't there to witness it. She was outside with Mr. Larson and the accomplished readers having recess. Good thing. That would have killed me. She already made fun of the fact that I had Peanuts Treasury checked out from the Bookmobile for six weeks. All she had to say was, "I can't believe you're still reading that" and I immediately wanted to take what had previously been my greatest reading treasure and burn it.
Anyway, after the torture of communal oral sacrifice of what was probably someone's proud literary accomplishment, we were allowed to remove our desks from the sacred circle and find peace in isolation and the jumble of words in our very own Bookmobile books. I always made sure to check out National Geographic books like Volcano or Earthquake because there were lots of pictures, and you could learn everything you needed to know without ever reading a word. But, mostly I just stared at the walls during silent reading.
On this particular day, I stared at a colored mimeographed map of the world and all of the sudden it hit me: Holy shit, all the continents fit together! I felt like Moses. This was life-changing. No, this was world-changing. I'd be famous! Kelly, Kelly, Kelly! She'd have to be impressed. As far as I knew, no other sixth-grade boy had discovered all the continents use to be gathered as one. In fact, no other human being had discovered that.
I rushed home to tell my brother. I couldn't just tell anyone. They might beat me to it. But he'd listen. He'd know how to proceed.
Yeah, right. What he did know was how to kill dreams: "Oh yeah, that, that's called continental drift; it's been known about forever."
But not all was lost. There was a warm, sloppy spring day with lots of mud and tender green grass. The sun was hot, the snow was melting. Richard, Jason and I were all out at the swings doing spiders with Kelley and I don't remember who, and a spider is where on separate swings you hook your legs together in some convoluted way that I don't recall, and swing in unison, as one, and somehow it had all gone horribly wrong, and Richard and Kelly were spidering gleefully while Jason and I, their servants, ran back and fourth between the swing set and the water fountain in the building, which was no small journey, and using small Dixie cups left over from the lunch ladies serving us warm cider in the morning, we had to bring them fresh water, which they quickly downed laughing hysterically, before sending us on our way again.
Then, to make things worse--or better, I couldn't quite decide which--my old girlfriend, Lynn, started slapping the cups of water out of our hands half way through our journey back to please Kelly, my woman, my goddess. And dang, the devilish smile on Lynn's face was so damn cute, I didn't know what meant more: to get the cups of water back to Kelly so she'd know how much I truly did love her, or to watch the gleam in those dark brown eyes of my new antagonist.
By the time school was out, I was on cloud nine. I was in love. With who, I wasn't sure, but that didn't matter. What was clear was that girls were amazing.
I spun home in circles, writing a song as I went:
Baby, I am a want you
Baby, I am a need you,
Baby, I am gonna buy your love
I think I was thinking in the upper-middle class, shower-you-in-presents sort of way with the last line here, rather than the prostitute-down-on-some-dark-corner sort of way, but I was definitely too high, no matter how bright I was, to be doing any relevant sociological analysis that either way it amounts to sort of the same thing.
But here's the kicker, as amazing as those lines were, after the whole symphonic transition (sort of like in "A Day in a Life") there was this amazing couplet to a tune I absolutely knew would someday take hold:
And I can't help falling in love with you,
No, I can't help falling in love with you.
I knew I had a hit. Absolutely. There is no way the world would ever let such a remarkable song go by unnoticed. I just had to figure out how to write it down.
I kept my secret until ninth grade when I first consciously heard Elvis on the radio and realized that amazing couplet wasn't mine after all.
We called him Old Yeller. The name had a sort of double meaning. One part meant that his short hair was a dingy yellow color, a color that we called "yeller" in those days. The other meant when he opened his head, the sound he let out came closer to being a yell than a bark.
I hated it. I was always terrified I'd mispronounce some difficult word, like "meant" as Me-Aunt and everyone would laugh. "Ha, ha, ha--you sound so British. Me aunt! Me aunt! Me aunt!" The only silver lining was that Kelly wasn't there to witness it. She was outside with Mr. Larson and the accomplished readers having recess. Good thing. That would have killed me. She already made fun of the fact that I had Peanuts Treasury checked out from the Bookmobile for six weeks. All she had to say was, "I can't believe you're still reading that" and I immediately wanted to take what had previously been my greatest reading treasure and burn it.
Anyway, after the torture of communal oral sacrifice of what was probably someone's proud literary accomplishment, we were allowed to remove our desks from the sacred circle and find peace in isolation and the jumble of words in our very own Bookmobile books. I always made sure to check out National Geographic books like Volcano or Earthquake because there were lots of pictures, and you could learn everything you needed to know without ever reading a word. But, mostly I just stared at the walls during silent reading.
On this particular day, I stared at a colored mimeographed map of the world and all of the sudden it hit me: Holy shit, all the continents fit together! I felt like Moses. This was life-changing. No, this was world-changing. I'd be famous! Kelly, Kelly, Kelly! She'd have to be impressed. As far as I knew, no other sixth-grade boy had discovered all the continents use to be gathered as one. In fact, no other human being had discovered that.
I rushed home to tell my brother. I couldn't just tell anyone. They might beat me to it. But he'd listen. He'd know how to proceed.
Yeah, right. What he did know was how to kill dreams: "Oh yeah, that, that's called continental drift; it's been known about forever."
But not all was lost. There was a warm, sloppy spring day with lots of mud and tender green grass. The sun was hot, the snow was melting. Richard, Jason and I were all out at the swings doing spiders with Kelley and I don't remember who, and a spider is where on separate swings you hook your legs together in some convoluted way that I don't recall, and swing in unison, as one, and somehow it had all gone horribly wrong, and Richard and Kelly were spidering gleefully while Jason and I, their servants, ran back and fourth between the swing set and the water fountain in the building, which was no small journey, and using small Dixie cups left over from the lunch ladies serving us warm cider in the morning, we had to bring them fresh water, which they quickly downed laughing hysterically, before sending us on our way again.
Then, to make things worse--or better, I couldn't quite decide which--my old girlfriend, Lynn, started slapping the cups of water out of our hands half way through our journey back to please Kelly, my woman, my goddess. And dang, the devilish smile on Lynn's face was so damn cute, I didn't know what meant more: to get the cups of water back to Kelly so she'd know how much I truly did love her, or to watch the gleam in those dark brown eyes of my new antagonist.
By the time school was out, I was on cloud nine. I was in love. With who, I wasn't sure, but that didn't matter. What was clear was that girls were amazing.
I spun home in circles, writing a song as I went:
Baby, I am a want you
Baby, I am a need you,
Baby, I am gonna buy your love
I think I was thinking in the upper-middle class, shower-you-in-presents sort of way with the last line here, rather than the prostitute-down-on-some-dark-corner sort of way, but I was definitely too high, no matter how bright I was, to be doing any relevant sociological analysis that either way it amounts to sort of the same thing.
But here's the kicker, as amazing as those lines were, after the whole symphonic transition (sort of like in "A Day in a Life") there was this amazing couplet to a tune I absolutely knew would someday take hold:
And I can't help falling in love with you,
No, I can't help falling in love with you.
I knew I had a hit. Absolutely. There is no way the world would ever let such a remarkable song go by unnoticed. I just had to figure out how to write it down.
I kept my secret until ninth grade when I first consciously heard Elvis on the radio and realized that amazing couplet wasn't mine after all.
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