The Spoken Word

Transcript of Steve Horton’s inaugural audio essay available on the home page of www.fowlervillenewsandviews.com

   This happened nearly 20 years ago and occurred a few months after my mother had passed away. My step-father, having finally sorted through Mom’s personal possessions, handed me a box with various keepsakes he’d found.

  Among the mementos she’d saved were my early report cards. Back then our elementary teachers wrote your grade in a square next to the particular subject—arithmetic, reading, penmanship, spelling, and so on. If you did real well, you got an “O” for outstanding and if your performance was just so-so, then you received an “S” for satisfactory. Of course, a third possibility existed, namely failure; but fortunately I managed to be of at least average ability in my studies.

   The card also had a citizenship panel, listing different socialization skills—such as getting along with others or sharing. Here the range was from “1” for being very good to “4” for being a malcontent.

   In addition, the teacher could write a short comment about your attributes or shortcomings. During my elementary school career, I had seven different teachers—all of them women. In retrospect, from an adult vantage point, they were fine ladies but as a youngster I had my favorites.

   The reports cards offered evidence of why I remembered a couple of them with fondness, while a couple of others had instilled a degree of trepidation.

    Seeing these cards, after so many years had passed, proved that memory is selective—holding onto the good parts and conveniently forgetting or glossing over the less pleasant experiences.

   I’d always loved to read, and my recollection was that I had done well in history and literature. From the grades I got in these subjects, mainly O’s, I saw that this memory was accurate. I recall being less enamored with figures, although I did not totally dislike math. That came later in school when I was introduced to algebra. So, seeing S’s in this subject was not a surprise, but overall I thought I’d done better than I apparently had. I was not quite the academic wiz I’d thought I was.

    As for Citizenship, my ability to properly behave ebbed and flowed. My main difficulty, it seems, involved talking too much, usually out-of-turn.

   Apparently, I could squash this urge to chatter  in the classroom for long periods of time—no doubt under threat of parental punishment--but inevitably the character flaw would re-appear.  The report cards were a literal paper trail of evidence of my backsliding.

   One year I would start out with 1’s and 2’s, only to spiral downward into 3’s and 4’s as the weeks went by. Other years, with a different teacher, all hell would apparently break loose from the very start.

   Again, I vaguely remembered that I did better with some teachers than others, but from the evidence of the report cards, none of them regarded me as a model citizen when it came to being quiet at the appropriate time.

  Where memory betrayed me was in the realm of class participation—something I’d always thought of as my strong suit. One of the teachers, after the first semester, complimented me on this in her comment. However, after the second semester was over, she felt obliged to offer a much different assessment: “Stephen talks too much, and he seems to have an opinion on everything.”

   WELL, THERE YOU ARE—a harbinger of things to come. Even then, this teacher (bless her soul) saw what would lie ahead if adequate remedy was not found.

    After 40 years of newspapering, during which I’ve offered a goodly number of opinion pieces intermingled with the news stories, it appears a cure has not yet been found in my case.

    All of my commentaries, up until now, have been offered in written form. This one is no exception. But including an audio version is a new wrinkle to the endeavor.

   The written commentary rises or falls by the judgment of the reader. Adding my spoken voice to the equation, thereby requiring the need to listen, adds a different dimension to the undertaking. We’ll see if adding the spoken word merits an O or S or F.