Sorry I Worried You

Book Owner

150 Book Owner After I had my tonsils removed, my mother bought a ream of ruled paper and drew columns on fifty sheets. “This will get you started,” she said. “You can print all the numbers as high as you want and see how you feel about going on when you finish.” I started in at once. Nobody had ever done this, I thought, reaching one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, and ready to fill more pages the following day. “No mistakes,” my mother said, proofreading before I fell asleep. “You haven’t got one of those numbers wrong or out of place.” I was six years old. The next morning my aunt brought me a game of Cootie, and I took turns for four players at once, rolling the die for each of them, not counting past six for three hours. 151 * * * On the first day of school, in third grade, Miss Ozminski told us it was time to master cursive, and she was going to start us with ovals repeated across the first page of our writing notebooks. She had filled our inkwells while we were outside for afternoon recess, and now we needed to slip the steel point she was passing out into the wooden stick that was coming around next. We held our new pens up to show her we were ready to write. Dip and swirl, she explained, and don’t let the tip rest on the paper. “Around, around, around,” she chanted. “Stay inside two lines.” We had to master the Peterson method unless we wanted to be babies like the second graders who printed with pencils. We had to be careful or we’d be inkwell spillers, the stained ones who were going to be failures, heading straight for the welfare line where the worthless went since the Democrats had started the handout system. All year we had blotters from the bank, the previous month stamped on each one as they were passed back the row. When March was handed out during the first week in April, a comic wind trying to blow open a secure vault, Miss Ozminski told us we had to use cursive for every assignment or we wouldn’t get credit. We wrote a letter to our parents, signing our names. We wrote a letter to the bank president to thank him for the blotters, signing our names. My signature was perfect. I could write it the same way over and over. I’d signed it where it said BOOK OWNER on the inside covers of the multiple copies of the history book we’d finished in January and put away on a shelf in the back of the room. George Vaughn, I wrote, knowing nobody would see my name until next September. George Vaughn. Every boy and girl would think I’d read the book they had. I imagined my letters arriving. I imagined the next ones I would write. I wanted every letter of my name to be leg- 152 ible, thirty-five third graders in September 1957 seeing how George Vaughn, a boy they all knew, had mastered penmanship. * * * At the beginning of fourth grade, Miss Logue assigned us pen pals. “Miss Ozminski tells me you all had perfect penmanship when school was dismissed in June,” she said. “We shall see. Now you have to write to someone you have never met. The first impression that someone will have of you is through your handwriting.” All of the addresses were in Canada because, she said, the students were certain to be strangers. Pamela Phelan waved her hand to claim she already wrote to famous people. She’d received, just last week, a letter from Tommy Sands, who told her he was glad she loved his song “Teenage Crush.” She had a letter signed by Timmy, who was saved each Sunday by dependable Lassie. “The best one,” she said, “is from Winston Churchill,” but nobody in the room was impressed by a letter from someone older than our grandparents. “None of them,” Miss Logue said, “live in Canada,” and I wrote and wrote until I had three pages to send to Bradley Lester, who lived in Halifax. I thought everybody would get an A for friendly letters, but Ronald Riggs went above and under the lines, and Don Gebert spelled seventeen words wrong and forgot his return address. On television that week, Lassie ran home...