Sentenced To A Good Time

Memories of a time earning A’s by being a D.

For many kids, school is not something to be enjoyed. This is a story about a time when getting an education was a delight, and a thank-you note to the teacher who made that possible.

The year is 1994–95. The place, 10th grade English class at Murrah High School in Jackson, MS, where we spent most of our time reading and dissecting various books by Hemingway, Steinbeck, and others. I’m sure I’d appreciate them now, but at the time they were more boring than … a good metaphor I’d have learned to write had I paid better attention.

Literary symbolism wasn’t my thing, but there was one element of English class I got into in a big way: vocabulary. I was ebullient about it. Effusive, even. I loved adding words to my internal lexicon, mostly because of an assignment that made it all worthwhile.

Each week our teacher, Mrs. Alston, would indoctrinate a new set of words and their meanings, and for homework we had to write sentences with our newfound lexemes.

A pedestrian assignment all in all, except we were a tad obstreperous, my little friends and I, and we took to a proto-version of that staple of Comedy Central late-night programming: the roast.

With each assemblage of words, we’d occasion to write graphic and descriptive invectives about each other under the premise of the exercise.

It is easy for me to conjure the image of a prim and proper English teacher (which Mrs. Alston, standing all of five feet and maybe a drop over 100 lbs, fit to a tee) showing great indignation at our weekly undertaking, dispatching our endeavors with a stern lecture and a failing grade, ending our rascality in its infancy.

Mrs. Alston did no such thing, and as long as we used each word properly, we were free to write the most splendiferous, fantastical sentences about our classmates our pubescent brains could conjure. We took full advantage.

My parents evacuated my childhood home several years ago, and in the process of moving forced us to sift through the relics of our adolescence. I threw away most things: trophies, posters, 25 years worth of Sports Illustrateds. I kept my English notebook, and doubt I’ll ever unburden myself of it, because writing those sentences was the most fun I ever had in an academic setting, and it’s all because Mrs. Alston had that most precious of gifts for a teacher, or any human being — a sense of humor.

Thank you, Mrs. Alston. Without your guidance, I’d never be able to use the word eleemosynary in a sentence. And that’s the God’s honest verisimilitude.