Since I’m turning stinking 70 in the Plague Year 2020,
and there’s no telling where I might be during the approaching Festivus, I
shall start early with the Airing of the Grievances.
I was a Brain in high school. Not in the “in” crowd, not
a cheerleader, never on Homecoming Court, never up on the latest fashions and
not good at styling my hair. But could I ever ruin a “curve,” especially in
English class. When we got test papers back, someone would ask the teacher, “Will
you grade this on a curve?” She would answer, “Sorry, there’s no curve. Someone
got 100.” And Harold Eastwood would roll his eyes and say, “I wonder who.”
(This is not the grievance. I liked Harold, and his teasing was always good-natured.)
The grievance attaches to the NMSQT. Not an identity,
it’s the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Standardized tests never
scared me, and I filled in those little rectangles with confidence. I did all
right.
Then, at the end of the year, there was one of those
ordeals they called an assembly. One of the school officials announced the
thrilling news that a sophomore had taken the NMSQT and earned an honorable
mention. Great news for our school, he intoned. Most sophomores wouldn’t even
try the test, but here we had a brilliant, brave young man who not only took
the test, but got Honorable Mention, something almost unheard of in the history
of NMSQTesting, which is ever so challenging, and we can hardly believe we have
such an achievement in our student body, and on and on. He ended with “Wealsohadawinner,DianaHeman.” I didn’t think anybody heard it. So, yeah, it was true, I was
chopped liver.
At the end of the day, I was walking to my locker. A teacher stood on the little porch of her “portable” classroom. She was apparently the one person who heard that last sentence. She called out, “Congratulations.” I stared for a moment, thinking, “Yeah, sure,” but didn’t say anything. I regret that I was rude to her. I guess she has a grievance too.
