20071214

The Note

by Mrs. White

From as far back as I can remember poor spelling has always been my Achilles heel, and thanks to Catholic schools filled with nuns who'd rather hold spelling bees than prepare an actual lesson, I got the opportunity to flaunt my flaw with humiliating frequency. Though an avid reader, a strong writer and overall quite intelligent, I was always the worst speller in my class. Whenever we had class spelling bees (which my memory insists was constantly), I had to brace myself for the same inevitable, unavoidable conclusion: I'd be certain to miss the first - or, if I was lucky, the second - word and would have to spend the remainder of the afternoon burning with shame while listening to my classmates spell, spell on. In a class of only seventeen it became my unfortunate claim to fame, for it was common knowledge that Matt was the best at math, Jenny was the prettiest, Faith the nicest, Kendra the scariest, Stephen had the worst cold sores, and Maggie couldn't spell. Although it didn't occur to me at the time, I'm sure this is why Sr. Marie immediately had me pegged as the author of THE NOTE, a single sentence found abandoned on the floor of my 8th grade classroom so vile, evil and reprehensible that my teacher dedicated four hours of class time to sniffing out the culprit, obtaining a confession, and then leading a class prayer service for the author. And since I was the only person in the class who would spell the word "whore" that way, three of those four hours were dedicated to me.

6S

Mrs. White writes when she should be doing most everything else. She "anonymously" blogs at pretty to think so and continues to wait in quiet desperation for her own robotic servant.