How To Lose a Spelling Bee
(but whistle far and wee)
The Trinity School third grade spelling bee came down to Thomas and me. We stood in front of the class, batting correctly spelled words at each other until our teacher said, “Holly…Balloon.” I thought for a period of time that felt endless. The word hung like my whole life, or at least my self-esteem, depended upon it, not knowing one of those things deflates perhaps, but bounces back.
There is an ee cummings poem called “Chansons Innocentes.” Cummings wasn’t French, and he almost never titled his poems. But this was our favorite. My dad would read it to me and made sure I looked at the page and how cummings wrote it:
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
And bettyandisbel…
My dad would say, “see what he did? He ran their names together. It’s excited! Eddieandbill! Bettyandisbel—they come dancing!” I understood the second girl’s name must really be three syllables, Is-A-bel, but when you’re rolling down the green grass hill, shouting “wait up!, you don’t have time for syllables.
The world is mudlucious. “Mudlucious!” Dad exclaimed. “He made that up. Listen to it!” What I heard, and he was right, you can make up not just words, but the whole world. You can stomp and hopscotch all over it. Life itself is malleable.
ee cummings, who was from Massachusetts and had no excuse, spelled balloon in his poem like this:
the little lame baloon man whistles
far and wee
One L in balloon. Giant leaps between the words far and wee. This has been corrected, but I feel certain in my father’s weathered college copy of ee cummings' selected poems, balloon was missing a string.
I solemnly said, "Balloon. B-A-L-O-O-N.”
and I lost the spelling bee.
(thomas and me.)
I knew better, but I can't say I lost on purpose. The poem was an image in my brain, silhouette of my childhood, the celebration of it happening while the balloon man strayed further out of sight while we were too busy hopscotching to notice. I pictured the “queer goat-footed baloon man” lonesome, missing a piece, without the glue that stuck eddie with bill, bettyandisbel.
ee cummings's refusal to adhere to grammar is the exact reason I understood and respected grammar. And it’s how I learned to break rules for better reasons than rebellion. I learned to break rules because my heart told me to. Because breaking rules can transform sleight of hand out of trick and into magic. Because some rules are boa constrictors and following them gets the whole lump of you swallowed inside its slither. Some rules are there just to test you, and it’s not your courage that is at stake, but the opposite: your willingness to be afraid, to misspell, and skip-to-my-lou right over an L. I’ve broken a few rules that I ought to have respected. Like wearing my seatbelt. Flossing. Saying I love you every time I part with someone whom I do. Ocean tides. Quitting everything I’ve ever quit, besides basketball. That was actually the right thing to do.
One spring afternoon, my friend Omar and I sat on my terrace drinking beers in comfortable lull. He abruptly said, “Did I ever tell you I made it to the state spelling bee finals?” I told him my career ended in my third grade classroom. He lost too.
Muffin. M-U-F-F-E-N.
“Defining moment,” he said, tilting his chair out of the sun and lifting a beer. “You and I are the smartest people I know, and we’ve done nothing with our lives.”
“Muffen,” he shook his head and sighed.
“Baloon,” I deflated.
The oak tree surrounding my terrace was just starting to bud, but a solitary dead leaf had clung to the tree though fall and winter by something invisible—a vein, or thread of web, something so delicate that even with no wind, the leaf spun wildly, and the sunlight caused brief metallic glimmer when it hit its edges and I said, “sometimes I like to witness something I know that no one else in the whole world knows is happening but me.”
“Like what?” he asked.
I pointed out the spinning leaf, which slowed almost to stopping and then spiraled the opposite way.
He nodded. “Well, I break world records.”
“Tell me what world records you’ve broken.”
“So, one time in your apartment when everyone was outside," he said, "I jumped and touched the middle of the archway, then did a little dance and none of you saw me, and I broke the record for doing that whole movement. No one else has ever achieved that.”
“Oh! Well if I had seen you, I wouldn’t have told anyone.”
“Thank you for showing me the leaf,” he said.
Omar is still the world record-holder of that dance because I wouldn’t know how to begin to attempt an upset. If you witness something no one else ever sees, or if you do something no one else has ever done and you never speak of it, it's yours. Some magics should be shared and some should be kept pinned to the inner-lining. Only you will know you set the record for spinning the world at your own speed: quick like bettyandisbel or slow as mudlucious. You may not win the spelling bee, but you’ve got pockets-full of misplaced letters, enough to spin stories only you can tell.