Sounds like a great
project, right? There had to be a
catch, right? Yeah, you got that right.
Catch Number One: no
writing about California. Makes sense,
right? That was our home state. California would have been too easy. Besides we were forever doing California-related
assignments. This was the same period
of my life when the Five Geographic Regions of California were impressed
permanently into my consciousness like the wheel ruts of a hundred thousand
prairie schooners plodding inexorably westward: "High mountains, low
mountains, Central Valley, coast, dry lands."
Catch Number Two:
each kid had to have his or her own state.
To make sure that we all had unique, non-redundant states, Mrs. Lewis
instructed us to take out a sheet of paper and write down three states in order
of preference. I took a sheet of paper
out of my three ring binder and wrote down
- Texas
- Hawaii
- Alaska
Well, sure. What other states are there when you’re in
the fourth grade? Did John Wayne ever
make a movie about New Jersey? Did
people throw Ohio-themed parties?
No. You ask a fourth-grader to
write about a state, he’s going to pick one of those bigger-than-life glamour
states.
So that’s what I did.
I went for the glamour. I looked down at the three states I’d
chosen. What a glorious page turner of a
report I envisioned. The Alamo. Whale hunting. Hula dancers back lit against a smoldering
volcano.
Mrs. Lewis stood in
front of the class holding a clipboard and a ball point pen and told us she would
call each name on the class roster, and then we would tell her the first state
on our list, and if another kid had chosen that state, we’d go on to our second
choice state and so on.
Well, that’s when my
dreams of glory crashed to the ground like a hastily improvised defilade succumbing
to the fiery fury of Santa Ana’s cannons
You see, my last
name is Polish. All right, well, technically
not Polish, but it's in the Polish Zone.
You know how Polish last names tend to be overrepresented at the tail end
of the alphabet? Well, I can only hope
that things have changed in these more enlightened times, but in my school days,
all us kids in the Polish Zone got the last pick of everything. That’s because anytime you had to choose any
choosable entity of any kind, whether it was a topic for a project or a sport
to play at recess, or a part in the Christmas pageant, or a percussion
instrument to bang on during the "She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain"
sing-a-long, you were always one of the last three-to-five names called. You see, the class roster determined the
order in which such things were chosen, and the class roster was organized
alphabetically.
As Mrs. Lewis called
out "Kimberly Abrams," Larry Woyczk, Timmy Waselewski and I rested
our faces on our palms and exchanged sideways glances with one another. Tina Zybinski put her head on her desk and
let out a long sigh.
Now keep in mind, I
was born at the height of this country's postwar baby boom. There were about 35 kids in that class. By the time Mrs. Lewis got to me, Alaska,
Hawaii and Texas were long gone, as were Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and any
state in which an armed constabulary had ever shot it out with Bonnie and Clyde,
including Missouri and Iowa.
I don't remember how
it happened, but I ended up with Maine.
I think Mrs. Lewis must have assigned it to me from the seventeen or so states
that were still left when she got to the Polish Zone. Lord knows what Tina Zybinski ended up with,
probably South Carolina or Delaware or someplace.
Now, don't get me
wrong, I think South Carolina and Delaware are great places. So is Maine.
Maine has Moose and fall colors and maple syrup and beaches and the Appalachian
Trail and Acadia National Park, but I didn't know that when I was in the fourth
grade. To my mind, Maine was just so
much unclaimed merchandise dropped at the curbside, just another cast off for the
Polish Zone kids.
Kind of like my
"Comin' Round the Mountain" block.
In Kindergarten. That was my
instrument, a block. I'm talking about an actual piece of wood. I used to beat on it with a spoon or
something. That was life in the Polish
Zone. Stacie Alvarez got the triangle. Jimmy Bailey got the tambourine. I got a piece of wood and a spoon.
Things didn't
improve in high school. They had this
system where you would request your electives at the beginning of the year, and
if they had room in the elective you asked for, they'd put you in that, and if
they didn’t have room, they'd assign you to some other, less sought after
elective.
And how did they
decide who got first pick of the electives?
Right. They went through the school
roster.
Alphabetically.
That's how I ended
up taking two years of Latin.
And you know
something, Latin was like Maine for me. Sure
I resented it at first, but as the years went by, I realized what a useful
thing Latin was and what a remarkable opportunity I'd chanced upon by virtue of
my bottom-of-the-roster pseudo-Slavic surname.
You know the
wonderful thing about studying Latin? Latin
teaches you to be precise. When you've
studied Latin, you know how to pull apart big words, and even some not-so-big
words, and break them up into little Latin components. You can speak and understand English very
precisely because you know what each little Latin component means.
And I think it's
important to be precise when you're part of the anti-circumcision movement,
because that movement tends to be very particular about words. For example, the word uncircumcised. The anti-circumcision movement, for the most
part, shuns and disdains uncircumcised. Why? Because
it's a negative. When you say
"uncircumcised," you imply that circumcision is the normal or default
state of being, kind of the way that "insane" implies that sanity is
the default mental state of being.
So in our movement,
we don't say "uncircumcised."
We say "intact."
The problem is, as we Latin scholars know, intact is also a negative. It's formed from the Latin word tactus, meaning
"touch" and the Latin negative prefix in. Intact means
"untouched." Etymologically speaking, it's
every bit as much a negative as uncircumcised.
Uh oh. Now what word do we use? Intact seemed like such a convenient word,
and we've been using it for decades. We
even call ourselves "Intactivists." Are we
going to have to reprint all the brochures?
Well, no. I don't think so. One thing I've learned from living all these
years in the Polish Zone is, you work with what you got. If all you got is a wooden block and a spoon,
work with that. You'll make just as much
noise as the kid with the tambourine. So just keep pounding, and don't let yourself get discouraged.
