Author: avidbruxist

When Jordana and I used to ride the Metropolitan Transit Authority together, one of our favorite things to do was to read the Spanish advertisements that ran along the ceiling of the train.  Or rather, she would read the ads in Spanish, and I would fall into fits of giggles.  See, Jordi didn’t speak Spanish.  Her accent was remarkably good, though she occasionally slipped into a French pronunciation of words like en.  On one particular ride I remember, Jordana decided to raise the stakes and not only read the ads but translate them too.  She read an ad for an ambulance-chaser who specialized in envenenamiento con plomo.  That’s lead poisoning, but I like her translation better: “an environment with feathers”.  I imagined someone calling up this law firm and saying indignantly, “I need an attorney; my environment is rife with feathers!”  After that, she spotted a Washington Mutual ad which boasted “Nuestros ATMs no cobran,” or “Our ATMs are surcharge-free”.  Jordana said confidently, “There are no cobras in our ATMs,” and I envisioned the poor bastards at Chase and Citibank convulsing from snake venom, their cash littering the floor.

I miss the MTA, and I miss my Jordi.

I wanted to cry.

My friend Sasha and I were standing at the base of a rock fall, staring up at the most menacing peak we had encountered in our six-day trek.  Another hiker had just told us that we had gone off our trail.  Now we either had to backtrack and then follow the trail for god knows how long, or go over this pass, which was next to the highest peak in this part of Spain.

Still incredulous, I said to the other hiker in Spanish, “But the yellow markers said to go this way.  A lady yesterday told us to follow the yellow markers to the next refuge.”

She responded, “No, no, the yellow markers mark the way to the highest peaks in the Pyrennes.  Your refuge yesterday was on the way to this peak.  That’s why she told you to follow the yellow markers.”

I thanked her for her help, and the woman trekked on.  Sasha asked me what it was going to be.  Were we going to turn back and waste another two hours getting back to the right trail?  Or were we going to climb up this sumbitch?  I told her that as painful as this climb might be, I couldn’t face the idea of going backwards—it just went against my adventurous nature.

I took a deep breath and started upward.  The rocks at the bottom of the fall were the size of pick-up trucks.  I leapt from one to the next.  My breathing deepened.  The higher I climbed, the smaller the rocks became.  They began to shift under my weight.  By the time I was halfway up, I was trudging through baseball-sized rocks and dirt that slipped out from under my feet.  Pretty soon I was on all-fours, grasping at whatever was within reach.  I huffed and puffed and wiped my forehead on my sleeve.  I dug my feet in and squeezed the earth in my hands.

Sasha and I didn’t speak to each other on the way up.  We couldn’t.  I was heaving air in and out of my lungs, and I heard her doing the same behind me.  My feet sank deep into the earth, and I yelled, “Heads up!” to warn her of the rockslide heading her way.  I glanced back.  She threw herself to one side, and the rocks continued their race down the mountain.  “Sorry…about that,” I said.  I had to pause in the middle of my sentence to breathe.

“Don’t…worry about it,” she replied.

I looked up to see how far I was from the peak.  It didn’t seem any closer than it had when we were at the bottom!  I forced myself to keep my eyes on the ground in front of me and continued my climb.  I waited what felt like an eternity and then checked the summit again.  How could it still be so far up?!  I repeated the process probably ten times.  Look down, wait, wait, wait, look up.  No closer.  The blood pounded in my ears, and I felt like I was breathing through a coffee stirrer.

At last, I got to about ten yards from the top.  I stared at the ground.  It was now gravel and sand.  “Keep going….” I mumbled to myself.  I pushed with my feet, pulled with my hands, now raw from clawing at the mountain.  “Keep going,” I said again, and pushed and pulled again.  Over and over, I pushed and pulled, until finally there was nothing left to push off and nowhere else to pull to.  I was on level ground.  I turned myself around on my hands and knees to look for Sasha.  She was a few yards away.  When she reached the summit, we sat up and collapsed into a hug.

I threw my fists in the air and sang the opening measures of the Rocky theme song.  Sasha laughed.

We looked down the mountain we had just summitted.

“I’m proud of us,” Sasha said.

I wanted to say that I was proud of us too, but I was too emotional to speak.

I slid my hands palms-down under the outside of my thighs and began to swing my legs.  My heels thumped against the horizontal wooden bar of the chair.  The new “media center”—we still called it the library—at Cove Creek Elementary was air-conditioned.  Goosebumps sprung out on my arms, and I suddenly had to pee.

The man seated across from me was dressed in pleated khakis, a short-sleeved plaid button-down, and hiking boots.  He had a wide brown mustache, and he was a little bald in front.  On the table in front of him was a booklet, a record sheet, and a perfectly-sharp #2 pencil.

“What is air made of?” he asked.

I bit my lower lip.  Without letting it go, I said, “I don’t know.”  He put a zero on the ledger in front of him.

“If Sally leaves her house at 7:45 and gets to school at 8:10, how much time has she spent traveling?”  My brother was teaching me to tell time, but I hadn’t quite mastered it.  It seemed so easy when he did it, but then again, he was in second grade and knew everything.  I studied the floppy drive of the brand-new Apple computer to my right.

“I don’t know,” I told the  man.   He drew a perfect zero right underneath the first one.

“If Jeff puts 8 eggs in each of 3 baskets, how many eggs are in all the baskets together?”  That seemed like it should be easy.  The green cursor of the Apple blinked against a black background.  It seemed to be counting all the seconds that I didn’t know the answer.

“I don’t know,” I said to the man.

My brother, the second-grade genius, and my sister, who had skipped second grade entirely and was now in fifth grade, were already in GT.  Their gifted-and-talentedness was not under scrutiny.  But now it was my turn.  My mom had gone to my teacher, Miss Kathy (for in the South in 1981, you still called unmarried teachers by their first names), and asked her when I would be evaluated for GT.  Miss Kathy, who had had both my siblings for first grade, had said, “Oh, Rebecca, you know Amy’s your social butterfly.  She’s not like Bruce or Laura.”  My mom was fuming but calmly requested that I be tested anyway.

So here I was, watching an eternal column of zeros stretch down the page across from me.  That’s when I realized:  I was stupid.  From that point, any academic endeavor that was remotely challenging was proof.  Writing papers took everything I had; tests were terribly stressful.  Moreover, I did all kinds of extracurricular activities to compensate for my lack of intellect.  I was drum major in the band; I got in the 12-person competition theater troupe; I became president of the AFS club; I studied in Italy for a year and Mexico for a semester; I sold the hell out of some books door-to-door.

What I distinguished about eight years ago was that I was accepting the opinion of a six-year-old.  Wow.  I mean, if some six-year-old came up to me now and said, “You’re stupid”, I wouldn’t think a thing of it.  Anyhow, it took a while, but I let that shit go.

Of course, occasionally, when I’m feeling six, when I don’t get an allusion my friends make, when I say something inappropriate, it crops up again.  But I’m always able to identify it as my own bullshit and let it go.

My question is:  Why can’t I do that with my other bullshit?

P.S.  I got into that damn GT program.  As Homer would say, I’m S-M-R-T.