Being Ten

In the foggy throes of early morning writing, I tire of my conscious mind-editor telling me to say things a certain way for clarification – clarification, clarification – that’s all she says; and I might may as well call her name her Clara F. Cajun from now on.  Fearfully, I’ve noticed lately of late that Clara the Editor is faster than my morning pencil can write – she’ll edit out a way of saying things before I, the pencil-handler, can get to that spot on the page, making it look like appear as though her words came first and were meant all along to be mine. Once I arrive with my pencil, I have to mark out her fancy, proper way of saying things – and say it my way. Who to trust?
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. . . A ten-year-old child standing in line outside the cafeteria for school lunch – my first day of school in this tiny Western North Carolina town in 1966 – I, from Noo . . . Yowark, as everyone in North Carolina called my home state – and their cruel entertainment from listening to me speak – mocking me in order to solicit waves of laughter from each other . . . taking turns, one and then the other, taking turns running out of line to approach me and ask the leading question, “How old are you?”


School House Steps

 Not understanding at first what they were getting at, and suddenly fearful that fifth graders in the South were not 10 years old as I expected, but rather 9 or 11 (and that would have been a cruel tragedy that my mom hadn’t told me about before we moved there) – and so answering truthfully, having no other ploy at my disposal – truthfully – I always said, “Ten” – and that answer is what brought waves of giggles that swelled into roars of laughter as each scout returned to her spot in line, to the embracing circle of her group – over and over again. I didn’t realize until I heard one of them shout, “She talks proper!” – and then another one, “She’s fancy!” – that it was not what I said, but the way I said ‘ten’, with its short e-vowel sound, that induced such howls of Southern laughter.

The way I said it was not the way they said it – which may as well have had a ‘y’ placed after the ‘t’, making the word look like ‘tyen’ if written on the page, and sounding like a near synonym for ‘tin’ if spoken. If I were to have peanut butter on the roof of my mouth, and charged with the task of getting it off using only my tongue in a backward-to-forward motion, then the sound to come out would be tyen . . . tyen . . . This same equation goes for the word, pen – pyen, pyen . . . which I was to use far more frequently when I stopped being ten.

And so, having endured howls of laughter before and after I understood and deciphered why the fifth-grade lunch line laughed at me – I still had no better answer to give them.  I was ten.

There was a pointy-faced girl named Martha, though everyone called her ‘More-thaa’, and she was the ringleader of this lunch line charade, for I saw her egging on others to take their turn in approaching me, prompting them with the words they should use once they got to me, “Ask her how old she is . . . ” 

One time I saw ‘More-thaa’ perform a pantomine of a movie star reclining on her chaise, holding one side of her head in apparent boredom while looking up to the sky, saying, “I’m t--------n.” – and in place of the vowel sound she gave it a prolonged breathlessness, not even a real vowel!  It was so unlike me – what she did. 

The View from School House Hill

Martha eventually became my best friend in the fifth grade – though not beyond because of a tendency for female backstabbing – who to trust? – and not before I was made to endure many more weeks of life-changing discovery in the differences between North-to-South pronunciations – but this, not nearly so painful and memorable as that accusation of being proper – “like she’s from England,” as I heard one person say.  Even more cruelly, “She’s trying to be fancy” – which implied I was trying to be above them in those mysterious, ever-changing, duplicitous North Carolina mountains, when really I just wanted to be ten . . .