Ah, yes:

By Mike Dewey
November 20, 2011
285

SUMMARY: Language, like an axe, is a tool. "The nominative case to identify the subject through a copulative verb" may not mean anything to you, but to me, it's just as important as not severing your thumb with a down stroke that'd cleave a two-by-four. Use the language correctly, and you get "Hamlet" and the "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Use it poorly and you get George W. Bush saying "The future will be better tomorrow." Or, "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." Good Lord .. This guy had an Ivy League education. And he had no idea how people would react to his inability to use the native tongue. To W, a noun was a screwdriver and a verb was a marshmallow. Good luck with that combination. "I think we ought to raise the age," our former president once said, "at which juveniles can have a gun." What!!?! I had an American history teacher back in high school who couldn't find a coherent sentence with a flashlight, but then again, he provided me with lots and lots of innocent entertainment. "He was still green behind the ears," he'd say, referring to an untested president like Abraham Lincoln. Or he'd say, "He got off scotch free," singling out someone from the Teapot Dome scandal. Instead of taking notes, I spent most of most class time compiling a list of his misstatements, gaffes and other examples of his clueless stupidity and took great pleasure in sharing them with my friends. Looking back, I was probably out of line to be so cruel. And I could have just kept all of it to myself. But where's the fun in that? If I'd been sitting in his classroom these days, his malapropisms would have zipped around the school (and the town and the state) mere seconds after he'd uttered them, thanks to crazy-fast cell-phone technology that threatens to eclipse common sense. " 'He was sworn in," I'd surreptitiously type, quoting the teacher, word for word, "in a farmhouse in Vermont by a kerosene lamp.' LOL." By school's end, he'd be fried. Or fired. He'd never know the difference. I have nothing but respect and admiration for most of the teachers in the country, but it's not beyond belief that some of them are, well, better suited, perhaps, for more fitting vocations. Last I heard, that American history teacher was selling insurance, which he probably enjoyed more and offered him a chance to forget his classroom missteps. I imagine he's retired comfortably now, never remembering the ammunition he supplied on a daily basis to a subversive would-be writer. Strange thing is, he remains a real presence when I think back on those days, a kind of comic-relief character in a drama that had few happy endings. Because high school isn't easy. It's a vicious, vituperative cauldron, filled with love and lies, insecurity and jealousy, intense pain and fleeting moments of pure, unadulterated joy. But, actually, it's all about survival. Hormones, when you're in your tweens, are like mushballs thrown at weighted milk cans on the county fair midway. They miss way more often than they connect with their targets and, essentially, you don't even realize that the game's rigged. There ought to have been a mandatory orientation session conducted before students stepped foot in high school, something honest and forthcoming, hosted by someone who'd just barely made it through those years, somehow avoiding the chomping, sharp-toothed maw that awaits all who pass through that swinging funhouse door. "First thing," I like to imagine myself saying, making eye contact with those kids. "Trust no one." Then I'd throw in the obligatory quote from "Risky Business;" to wit: "It seems to me that if there were any logic to our language, trust would be a four-letter word." And then I'd cue up "In the Air Tonight," followed by "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Most of us just barely get (or got) through the maelstrom of high school. Speaking from my own experience, by the time I left it behind, I was scarred and saddled with the following deficiencies: 5. That nothing I'd learned would help me in college. 4. That the teacher whose house I'd helped egg would sooner or later have me arrested. 3. That the only girl I'd dated would spend her senior year making fun of my stunted social skills. 2. That I couldn't dance a lick beyond a clumsy, plodding "slow dance" stumble-bum embarrassment. 1. That I'd wasted all those years being afraid of making a mess of things. And that's the one that stings because that's the one that matters. There's a clock ticking down to zero for all of us. We're older today than we were yesterday and tomorrow, well, you can do the math as well as I. We're not guaranteed another minute, another hour. As Jackson Browne so eloquently writes in "For a Dancer:" "Perhaps a better world is drawing near And just as easily it could all disappear." I don't know much but of this I'm certain. We're blessed with a finite number of days to make a difference on this planet, which is spinning about a thousand miles an hour as it rotates around the sun, the Big Star. Gravity is the law that keeps us earthbound, but faith, hope and charity are the attributes that assure us that we, as human beings who stumble so often, will always remain anchored to the Big Truth. Treat others as you would be treated. Even if they can't find a coherent sentence with both hands and need a map to find their way back home. Which brings us back to that high school teacher, the one who tried, but failed. "He took his brides," he said of a ne'er-do-well politician, "underneath the table." Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560.

Ah, yes:

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