Linna & Karyl

A few people—and by a few, I mean a couple, so let’s not get carried away—have asked me why I sometimes ask Linna and Karyl to check the spelling of something on our webpage. Maybe you’ve noticed. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, there’s a story behind it, and I’m finally ready to come clean.

It all started when I moved up to Edmonds from Ballard and landed in sixth grade at Beverly Elementary, in Mr. McAdams’s class. Now, I’m going to brag a little here, but bear with me. It’s important to the story, and besides, I get thoroughly humiliated before we’re through.

I was a good speller. A REALLY good speller. I won the spelling bee at Beverly Elementary and earned the right to represent our school at the district spelling bee. I was pretty excited. After all, how hard could it be? I’d already beaten everybody at my own school. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, as it turns out, quite a bit.

The big day arrived, and so did my parents, ready to watch their budding spelling champion take on the best spellers in the district. There was just one small problem. My principal—Mr. McHeffey, I think that was his name—had apparently forgotten about the spelling bee. He was supposed to drive me, and we got off to a VERY late start.

So now I’m stressed out, we’re running late, and I’m heading into the biggest spelling event of my young life. Not exactly the ideal preparation for a spelling champion. You’d think the principal might have remembered the one kid in the school who could spell. But apparently, calendars weren’t his strong suit.

When we finally arrived, the auditorium was packed. All the contestants were lined up onstage in one long row, facing the audience. My parents were out there somewhere, watching. By the time I got there, everybody else had already correctly spelled their practice word and their first official word.

Everybody except me, that is. I hadn’t even started.

My chair was at the end of the row, which, as it turned out, was the perfect place for what happened next.

I was called to the podium to spell my practice word. No problem. Nailed it! I was back in business. Maybe this late arrival thing hadn’t hurt me after all.

Then came my first official word.

I misspelled it.

CRAP!!!

That was it. My spelling bee career was over almost before it began. I had to walk back to my chair, and then came the final indignity: they slid my chair back about three or four feet to separate the eliminated contestants from those still in the competition.

There I sat, banished to the spelling bee’s version of Siberia.

It was humiliating. (And I’m not sure I could have spelled humiliating correctly at that point, either.)

Nobody actually said anything out loud, but I could hear them just the same. At least, I could hear them in my head.

“Why did we wait for this kid?”

“THIS is the spelling champion from Beverly Elementary?”

“What kind of school IS Beverly Elementary, anyway?”

I’m sure the audience was far too polite to think any of those things. But I was twelve, and my imagination was doing a fine job of making up for their silence.

When the whole thing was finally over, I couldn’t get off that stage fast enough. I wanted to disappear, move back to Ballard, change my name, and possibly find a new hobby. Something safe. Maybe checkers.

Fast-forward a few decades. The wound had pretty much healed, and I was talking with Linna Carlson. Somehow, the subject of spelling bees came up, and I told her my sad tale of arriving late, misspelling my first word, and suffering public humiliation on a grand scale.

Linna listened. Then she casually informed me that SHE had been there, too. At that very spelling bee. The one where I had made my brief and disastrous appearance.

And then she delivered the knockout punch.

Linna took SECOND PLACE.

And Karyl Hansen took FIRST!

Well, I’ll be darned.

Here I was, thinking I’d merely had a bad day at the spelling bee. Now I discovered that two of my own classmates had been there, too—and had gone on to glory while I was being escorted to the spelling bee’s version of the unemployment line.  To Linda's credit and breeding, I didn't detect a hint of a laugh or chuckle.   Not saying it didn't happen, ... just that I didn't detect it. 

And it got worse.

It wasn’t just Linna and Karyl who beat me. It was everybody else who finished ahead of me, too. Third place. Fourth place. Fifth place. And so on, down the line. I don’t know how many contestants there were, but I’m pretty sure there were at least fifteen people who could spell better than I could that day.

I had managed to turn a school spelling championship into a master class in public failure.

So now you know why I occasionally ask Linna and Karyl to check my spelling on the webpage. It’s not that I don’t trust spellcheck. It’s that I have a history. A painful history. And when you’ve been publicly defeated by your own classmates before you were even old enough to drive, you don’t forget these things.

Besides, why take chances?

Linna was the runner-up, Karyl was the champion, and I was the kid whose chair got moved backward.

Somewhere in the archives of Beverly Elementary, I suspect that’s still how they remember it.

I’m pretty much over it now, though.

Really.