Uncorrected

Live long enough, bear the scars.  Hiking in Big Sur, I come across a stand of burned redwoods.  An idyllic stream is burbling past the stand this morning, but I’m guessing it was dry as the fire flashed by years ago.  I stop, look up, and see the trees are ok, still green on top and inching skyward.  Coast redwoods are fire-adapted, like the similarly majestic and tough burr oaks of the prairie.  Alone in the forest, I smile.      

Alone in the forest, for some reason I’m transported back to Grayslake High School.  There’s too many synapses to keep track of and the stimuli makes em fire for reasons not immediately clear at times.  The fire has come and gone, clearing out the underbrush, but the redwoods are still here.  Scarred, but still here.  Why am I sitting in English class?    

The Manifest is a new creation, but not really.  It’s only new to Seasiders.  A weekly summary of Seaside affairs, it has a new name and new author.  That same author who didn’t quite adapt the way they wanted me to in high school.  This week’s offering has an inside joke about flunking typing class.  But it was the flunking of English class, repeatedly and quite decidedly, that has me smiling alone in the forest with my new redwood friends, scarred as they are.

Want to graduate from high school in Illinois?  There’s a short list of requirements and one of them is pass three years of English.  Want to pass English class at Grayslake High School in 1980?  Read some stuff, take some tests, write some stuff and then confess your grammatical sins with a “Correction Sheet”.  To complete the Correction Sheet properly, you had to write the grammar rule you defiled, and then re-write the offending sentence correctly like a good little automaton.  If you didn’t turn in your Correction Sheet, you didn’t just flunk the writing assignment, you got a zero.

Guess who wasn’t so keen on knuckling under to the grammar rules?  Combine a teenage burst of testosterone, no real time for high school bullshit given my not exactly Ozzie and Harriet (ask your grandparents) home life and the dubious notion that writing was the art to which I aspired, and you end up with not graduating with your high school class.  Ok with me.  If you’re surrendering to the man at age 17, the only path forward is servitude. 

But the scar is still there.  Scars are like that, what with not going away and all.  They fade, but they never quite leave you.  They become stories, and the stories become character. 

A fire ripped through this canyon.  It took what it could, but not these redwoods.  They have character.