The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs

Nowadays, Ms. Starling would get fired. I remember when the test results got announced. It happened to be a Friday, near the end of the Spring semester, my tenth grade year. I would spend the entire weekend, then the month of May, then my next two years, burdened by the outcome. Fuck, I’d think about it throughout college, and later when I took on job after job in non-profit sectors—United Way, Boys and Girls Clubs of the Carolinas, Habitat for Humanity, Make-a-Wish, Alzheimer’s Association. Why did she think it necessary to go through the roll of her American history class and let everyone know? No teacher later thought it necessary to spiel out PSAT or SAT scores. No one ever got on the intercom at 8:30 in the morni’ng at Payneville High School—usually a cheerleader or secretary—and found it absolutely imperative to list off students who did or didn’t pass some kind of head lice, measles, or rubella test. PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, American Spleen Foundation, Veterans Against Guns in America, ASPCA—I worked them all, later in life. Ms. Starling went down the roll alphabetically and said things in a sing-song voice like

“Teacher…farmer…banker…artist…engineer…lawyer…doctor…civil servant…”

My last name’s Younts, the last in the class. We didn’t have a Zouras or anything. Ms. Starling read slowly, and paused, and smiled and nodded, as if she’d christened everyone with a great occupation for later in life. She went on with another couple teachers, another couple of medical doctors—I’d been to school with most of these people since first grade and couldn’t imagine any of them knowing the alphabet in order, or how to set a broken arm—and said,

“Contractor…publicist…advertising agent… boat captain…military general…pilot…nurse.”

And then she came to me. She pointed her finger my way and, it wasn’t exactly unapparent, worked on pronouncing it correctly. She said, “Ornithologist.” She said, “For Roger Younts, it comes out ‘ornithologist.’”

Of course everyone, including me in the tenth grade, thought, What the fuck is an ornithologist? After I learned the word—I had to go home, ask my parents to go buy a dictionary, get the dictionary, and read it—I thought, How can my answers to questions like “Would you rather be outdoors or indoors?” or “Would you rather watch TV or learn how to knit?” or “If you had two choices to wear a sweater, would you choose blue or red?” come out ornitholo-gist?

Ms. Starling said, “Or-ni-tho-lo-gist,” like that, with the emphasis on the “lo.”

Good God. I had enough problems with my name being Roger, what with that cartoon about Roger Ramjet, and that big chin of his which, oddly, I owned myself. “Or-ni-tho-logist!” My history class classmates yelled. “Orni-tho-lo-ist!” they yelled, all the students who wouldn’t become teachers, contractors, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, artists, bankers, farmers, publicists, and so on.

In a way, this was the time that made me more secure and confident. If I saw a psychiatrist, I’d bet he or she would say, “This is the exact time that made you the person you are today, Roger.”

Ms. Starling smiled. She said, “Are you interested in teeth, Roger? Let me see your teeth. Maybe it’s because you need braces that you came out as an ornithologist.”

________

This memory dwindled, diluted, and finally evaporated. I forgot about the test—before I forgot, I thought it was the Myers-Briggs test when I came across such a thing mentioned in a Psychology 101 elective course in college, but it ended up being something called the Holland Codes test, or some kind of bastardized form of it—until, at the age of fifty, as I considered retiring early because I tired of asking people for money non-stop, I walked into a place called the Needy Seed Feed and Flora in my home-town, to buy my mother...