Wednesday, May 19, 2004 My first blog
Early on in seventh grade, everyone in homeroom stood clustered up near the front of the classroom while the teacher went to get something from another room. Matt, the kid that nobody liked, elbowed past me and said something mean, so I took a piece of chalk and wrote "MATT SUCKS" on the blackboard. The kids next to me noticed and giggled, and as Matt was working his way through the crowd to tattle, I erased it, and they had nothing on me.
I tried to make this a story with a moral by adding the following true-life details: Mrs. Rasmussen, who taught life sciences as well as homeroom, was beginning the incubator experiment, so the reason everyone was up front was because we were examining the machinery while we waited for Mrs. Rasmussen to bring in the tray of one dozen fertile eggs. She set everything up and the semester continued. Sometimes in class, I'd look over at the light in the incubator, and I knew even then that it was wrong. What the hell were a class full of twelve year olds going to do with chickens? Between the Friends of Animals newsletter and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, I knew that pet chickens were doomed. But it hadn't been my idea, and I wanted them to hatch. I wanted a dozen baby chicks, yellow and peeping to disrupt class and stay in the homeroom for as long as they would let them.
Apparently, I thought about the incubator more than Mrs. Rasmussen did. Its presence was not part of a lesson, and although I remember once she got a well-liked boy to turn the eggs, otherwise, the incubator remained untouched.
Months later, long after it was time for the eggs to have hatched people bugged her about it, and she cracked shells open up at the front of the class. The smell was awful. Inside was something moist and gray. It was tufted with gray down over thin skin on one side and nearly liquid on the other, partially surrounded by hardened yoke. She cracked all of them, and the results were the same, one dozen times.
And this was where I was going to put the moral: I got to that school about seven years later than the other kids did, and I don't know whether that kid Matt was a jerk because people were mean to him or was mean to people because he was a jerk. I don't know what shaped him, who neglected him under the hot lights, and who insisted on cracking his only shell and walk around.
I know that I was not doing hero's work that day with the blackboard.
But here's the thing: the incubator was in late eighth grade, because Mrs. Rasmussen cracked the eggs when we were cleaning out the science room on the last day of school before the pool party. It was one of my final images of middle school rather than one of my first.
I have no idea what we were doing out of our desks on that day early in seventh grade, or really, whether anything at all provoked me to write "MATT SUCKS" on the board. My only absolution for that particular warcrime is that idiot Mrs. Rasmussen wasn't going to bring the incubator for another year and a half, so I didn't have the right metaphor yet.
posted by Frenz | 5/19/2004 07:31:00 AM
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