Permanent Record Card

I ran into one of my high school teachers this weekend. Mr. E. was selling his books at the same event where I was selling mine. He introduced himself and I recognized his name, so we talked and caught up for a few minutes.

I remember his advanced history class very well. Mr. E. didn’t exactly remember me, but instead he remembered exactly where I sat. That’s his gift, he said.

I may be wrong about this, but I remember that the advanced history class was brand new when I took it, almost like an experimental class. Mr. E. had these DBQs that he used to assign [force] us to write. He asked me this weekend if I remembered what DBQ stood for and I took a good guess but ultimately got it wrong. Document-Based Question, I think it was. He’d give us a thought-provoking question together with a moment in history and it was up to us to write our opinion on the matter using that specific historic moment to back up our argument. I actually liked these assignments, though my paragraphs were rarely as clever as I wanted them to be. The class was altogether different from the usual memorization-of-dates history classes we’d grown up attending. Mr. E. turned the class into a think-outside-the-box excursion.

In hindsight, I should have bought one of his books and spent some more time catching up. I was getting concerned that I was supposed to be manning my own table, and I thought there’d be time to stop back after the event. We always think there’s more time, don’t we?

Anyway, turning up at this particular event means we have the same publisher, so I’ll track him down and get one of his books. As I was thinking about contacting the publisher yesterday, I started remembering something else that happened in his class.

We were given a project to write historic quotes on a series of bulletin boards in the history room. Maintenance had come through and painted the boards a fresh, cream color. We were then given paint and small brushes to add the quotes we’d found. One of my friends had mistakenly painted the word “Some” on the board and realized with horror that that wasn’t the starting word of the quote she’d picked out. With no cream paint to cover it up, our little group of friends brainstormed what to do and decided we’d just make up a quote. I came up with, “Some people live; all people die.” We went with it. She put my quote on the board and attributed it simply to J.B.

I convinced my friend that no one was even going to notice this quote, but Mr. E. brought everyone’s attention to it during one of our next classes and we had a full-length discussion about it before my friends and I revealed that the quote was mine and not from a member of history. (Not yet, anyway—which is how I looked at it then and how I look at it now.)

In the end, we weren’t in trouble and the quote was allowed to stay on the board. And it would be neat if the story ended there but life has a way of staring you in the face sometimes.

So how do you go from one day fabricating historic quotes, to years later being so overly concerned about what you’re supposed to be doing that you cut a good conversation short? I have a whole lifetime of events to begin to answer this question, and they include feeling the weight of responsibility and attempting to fly under the radar by doing what I’m told. Some days are about just keeping your head down, paying the bills, and not making a big splash. Not every day is a day filled with stories.

But is that any way to live? Stories are where we hold everything that’s important. The stories we tell contain our crowning achievements, our best jokes, our amazing bowling score, and our enlightened conversations… Having a day without a story feels like we put our effort into the wrong things.

I’m slowly re-teaching myself that it’s okay to color outside the lines and to run in the hallways like I did a long time ago. I knew then what I forgot until now, that our permanent record cards are ours to fill, any way we wish. So let’s make them legendary.