From today's Times and News-Star
If the school year was a dog and the first day of
school was its head and the last day was its tail, you’d be picking it up right
behind its front legs about now. You’ve got a good, safe grip on it, but there’s
a lot of dog left hanging down.
October, which rivals May (for different reasons) as
the best month of the year, is soured by only two things: one is that winter and
cold is coming, and the other is that, for the young student, there’s lots and
lots of school year left.
That is not a bad thing once you get older and
develop an appreciation for how quickly time passes and how lucky you were to
be able to go to school. But who cares for such drivel when you’re a teenager?
Once you get out of school you learn that, secretly,
you never really leave. You’re always learning something, whether you want to
or not, which would be learning things the hard way. Examples:
“Yes, your honor, I understand!”
“Oh, so if my card is declined, that means there’s
no money in the account?”
“I don’t know, doctor. I guess it was that 12th
pork chop. Or the third bowl of Blue Bell.”
There’s a trick in just learning how to learn. My
dad says that on the first day of school, they taught him that two plus two
three equals four, and then on the next day they told him that one plus three
equals four, and he decided right then that if they didn’t even know what
equals four, how was HE supposed to ever know?
But once teachers coach you up, show you there’s
more than one way to skin a cat, you realize the world is your classroom. Some
of the smartest people you’ll ever meet got that way without having many
documents to frame and hang on the wall.
Often a friend named Gene writes me, which I’m
thankful for because he is old school, born in an oilfield company house near a
wide spot in the highway in Depression era- Garfield County, Oklahoma.
When he was in elementary school, his family rented
the first floor of a house owned by a gentleman named Whitey Liddard. He lived
upstairs and owned a nearby café where Gene’s father worked as a short-order
cook. Whitey had barely a third-grade education, but he was a Rhodes Scholar
when it came to running an oilfield-town café.
One day a young customer came in to celebrate his
high school education, the first diploma earned by a member of his family.
“He proudly displayed the new diploma for Whitey’s
inspection,” Gene said. “Whitey looked it over, front and back, then handed it
back to the graduate.
“Now that’s a fine thing to have,” Whitey said. “Just
don’t let it keep you from learning something.”
Hearing that from a wise man like Whitey Liddard
kept Gene modest as he went through both high school and college, even on to
some graduate work. “I still try to ‘learn something’ every day,” he said.
True, some things will remain forever a mystery. Why,
for instance, is the word panties plural and the word bra singular? Think about
it. Or not.
Why do we eat nuts out of socks in front of a dead
tree in our dens in December? Why is “contraction” such a long word?
The older I get, the more I understand that “I don’t
know” when I really don’t know is a handy answer.
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