By the 6th grade the person I would never become was made clear to me. I was in shop class with the assignment to create a breadboard from a slab of wood. If we lived in a true meritocracy I would still be there, that old man in the back row shaving a hunk of wood for the 80th year.
Straight, square and smooth the teacher demanded. What’s wrong
with a bump here and there, my inner voice yelled back. I discovered two things
in that class. First, that I was basically inept and secondly that I have a
thing for irregularity. Maybe being ept is overrated.
Think of the beauty of a deckled edge. Let the border rise
and fall and damn the perpendicular. It’s life’s grooves and edges, the sputters
and stumbles, the jagged right-hand margin of a poem that lends its character.
I wouldn’t give them up any more than the moon could relinquish its craters.
You can have your Wyoming and Colorado, ruler sharp, I’ll take loosey-goosey Michigan or Florida which looks as if it might break away at any moment. Do people still have breadboards? Most loaves are pre-sliced and for baguettes, I just rip and chew. My breadboard looked like it conformed to teeth-marks.
Nature has no straight lines. Antoni Gaudi said it first and
his wavy architecture replicates an organic flow as if on the way to the next
best thing.
There I was with my diminishing rectangle of wood that
refused its next incarnation as something straight, square and smooth. I admired its grit, dips and uprisings. It was to be my road map, prefiguring a
contrarian nature and a nose for connective threads, however coarse.
Of those three Ss, I must admit some allowance for smoothness as in skin (my favorite organ) or cobblestones and then there are smoothies but graveled with berries, of course. At this point of my life, it’s safe to say I will never accept that 6th grade mandate. One man's failure is another man's ept.
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