Making the Bed

When I was in sixth grade, I had a sleepover at BR’s house. I don’t remember much about what we did that night, but I remember the next morning very vividly. I remember his mom calling us out to breakfast, and BR stopped me at the door to his room. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked. 

“To breakfast. Why?” 

“You need to make your bed first. You should never go to someone else’s house and leave the bed unmade. It’s rude and disrespectful.” 

Stomach rumbling, I begrudgingly made the bed. It’s funny how things stick with you. Thirty years later, and I not only remember that incident, but I still make the bed every morning when I’m at someone else’s house. I can’t say that I do it very often at my own house, but that’s another matter altogether.

The Third Grade All-District Spelling Bee Champion

JR was telling me that whenever his wife questions him on the spelling of a word, he tells her that she shouldn’t doubt him because he was the third grade all-district spelling bee champion. So, I asked him how that worked, if he had to go through several levels of competition, being on stage in front of a microphone, surrounded by an enormous amount of anxiety and pressure. He said no, that they did it a little differently. It apparently was a written test, and they graded him by how many words he spelled correctly, and then compared him to other students in his school and area.

As we dug into this further, we realized that in order for this to work, they would have had to have given him a list of the words on a piece of paper and asked him to spell them. I started laughing, and I asked, “So, basically you just had to copy the word that you saw in the paper?! I think I know how you became the third grade all-district spelling bee champion! Are you sure it wasn’t just a handwriting assignment?” Then another thought hit me. How is it that everyone else missed the spelling of some of the words if they were handed to them on a piece of paper?!