When my age was still in single digits, a time shrouded in mystery because we had only just invented numbers, I had to figure things out by myself. This COULD be attributed to intellectual curiosity: I was an omnivorous reader, characterized by some as “precocious”, some as “gifted” and some as “smart-aleck” (to put it no lower.) I personally give more credit to my discovery at an early age that asking whether Ed Sullivan was mashed into that little white dot when the television was turned off would create sounds of unsuccessfully muffled laughter.
That last sentence was just a fictional example of my scientific inquiries. I would never really have asked that. (We never turned the television off right after Ed Sullivan.) But there were numerous topics that I cleared up entirely on my own, only to have reality rear its rude head.
PALEONTOLOGY: Our back yard featured a clothesline comprising wires strung from the house to an immensely tall pole (possibly six feet) set in a rounded white dome. The plastic shovels for beach use were not much good for excavation, and lugging the snow shovel into the back yard in the middle of August was a lot of work. So I was never able to prove my discovery that this pole had, in fact, been imbedded in the domed skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY: I was introduced to the writings of Will Cuppy at an impressionable age. One of the minor repercussions of this was my telling my elders about am ancient Greek whose name was pronounced Airy Ossel. They found it hilarious that I had missed a T while zipping through the pages discussing Aristotle. I felt better about this years later when my grandfather mentioned he never knew why a character in one of his books was nicknamed “Old Sock”, when his name, Socrates, was clearly pronounced Soak Rates.
SPELLING: It was also comforting to find I was not the first person in the world to be mizzled. I DID reason this one out all by myself, realizing one afternoon with a book in my lap, that though I could read the word pronounced muzzled (SPELLED “misled”), I had never heard anyone actually say it, as they preferred a word which I would have spelled miss-lea…hey!
CALISTHENICS: On the other hand, I also learned all by myself (after way too many years) that assuming a position in which your feet are separated until even with your shoulders means placing those feet “Should-width apart”. I knew what the P.E. teacher WANTED, even if I was absolutely sure he was telling us to stand “Shoulder with the Part.” This, um, doesn’t make a lot of sense, but a lot of things the P.E. teacher confused me.
I could go on with the refusal of the scientific community to pick up on my revelation that there is no dark side to the moon (the moon rotates, you see, so that the “dark side” just happens to point at us during the new moon phase, when we can’t see it) or my bold attempt to let everyone into the elementary school early (I had deduced that they were all standing around outside the front door to trick me; THEY deduced I had never heard of locked doors.) But I am older now, and I must get on with responsibilities based on my improved knowledge of the world. (Must just check my bank balance online. I KNOW that if I turn that website off and then on again often enough, the amount will correct itself.)
