The Best Thing I Learned This Summer

I know you are not supposed to use the word “I” in a school paper like this, but since the word “I” is in the assignment I figured it might be okay for this one. Maybe you already told us it was okay or not okay, Mrs. Brinkley, and I was just off somewhere in La La Land like you say. If that is the case, please accept my apology. I do mean it. I figured this assignment would be easy since I started at a new home this summer, my third one and maybe my last. When you start at a new home there are always lots of new things to learn, obviously, so when I saw this assignment, I wasn’t as scared as I normally am at big papers we have to write. But then I read Lindsey’s and Kaitlyn’s papers and they wrote about learning how to do a bicycle kick in soccer and how to zip line at camp and then I thought I must’ve done it all wrong, but I did do the assignment as you will see below. I just thought I should write this part afterwards and put it first, just in case I did the whole thing wrong and I was supposed to write about how I learned what my new favorite flavor of ice cream was or something like that. So please know I did my best and if all the “I’s” are wrong and the whole thing is just wrong then I do apologize and it wasn’t on purpose. 

This summer I began living at a new home run by a woman named Ms. Mawry. Ms. Mawry lives with her brother, but we don’t see him too often. Ms. Mawry is much taller than me or any other adult woman I’ve ever seen and she is large and strong. She has a wide lower half that gives her great balance. She has very thin lips and very long hair that she always keeps tied up tight in a very full knot. She likes talking more than action, which is nice because at other homes there is a lot of silence and some action, but the action is not nice and the silence is not nice either. So it was on my first night living with Ms. Mawry that she sat me down to have a talk with me to tell me the rules of the place, or at least that is what I thought at first. But instead of that, she just told me this, and I hope this is okay as my paper, just to tell you what she told me, but I guess some of my thoughts will get in there too. How could I help that?

Ms. Mawry sat me down and asked me what the word “deserve” meant. I thought for a while and I could see her getting impatient with me because she was tapping her fingers on her knees like adults do when time is running out on some invisible clock in their heads. When I had waited too long she got up with a “harumpf” and came back with a big fat book with a hardcover. She asked me if I knew alphabetical order and I said of course. She told me to look up the word and this is what I found: to do something or have or show a quality worthy of reward or punishment. She asked me what I thought of that, and before I could answer, she asked me what I thought of the idea that nobody deserves anything at all, that nobody deserves nothing, that nothing has anything to do with deserving at all. Then she started asking all sorts of questions as quick as can be, starting with whether I thought I deserved to be sent from home to home or not, or if some of the kids I’ve known in the homes deserved to be orphans more than others, or if the different people whose homes I’d lived in deserved to have a bunch of foster kids running in and out of their lives instead of having kids of their own, or if I deserved the scars under my right eye and above my left, or if Ms. Mawry deserved her bone cancer (whatever that is, but it sounds really bad the way she said it) and she went on and on with her questions long enough that I figured she was not asking me for answers but asking me like she was telling me the way adults do sometimes and there were lots of questions I can’t all fully remember now, but they were things like if I thought I deserved two working eyeballs that could wave the ocean and shine the sun (I remember those because her words were so strange about simple things) and if I did anything to deserve my toes or my fingers and on and on with good stuff like that until she finally cracked her pudgy knuckles and smiled and asked, “Tell me, and think on it good, what did you do little lady to deserve to be born at all?” And I did think on it good until I was ready and I told her something like none of us did anything to deserve being born at all because to deserve something you have to do something and before we were born we couldn’t do anything at all, so it stands to reason that since nobody did anything before they were born, nobody can possibly deserve or not deserve being born in the first place. This made her smile but it was the kind of smile a dog makes when it naps or a cat makes at its food bowl.

It was at this point in our conversation, or my lesson, that she asked me if I knew what a ziggy rat was and when I said no she went and got some wooden blocks from the toy chest and put four across then three on top of them then two then one. She said this was a ziggy rat. Then she asked why the four blocks deserve to be on the bottom. When I told her that was a silly question she said very loudly, almost yelling “Exactly!” Then she said this is why no one at school deserves an ‘A’ or an ‘F’ and why pretty girls don’t deserve their looks the same as ugly girls don’t and skinny girls don’t deserve their frame the same as chubby girls same as tall boys and small boys don’t deserve their height, and fast and smart children and slow and slower children how none of this had anything to do with deserving at all, just like I did nothing to deserve my parents and I did nothing to make them leave me, that by the very definition of the word I did not deserve my life. “In any direction,” she said. “You and me and all the you’s and me’s out there did nothing to deserve anything about this life in any possible direction. That is the only lesson you really need to remember if you are going to live in this home and I hope you learn it sooner than later. For your own sake, my dear, and absolutely nothing else.”

So those are my three paragraphs on the best thing I learned this summer. It feels like I could write a lot more about it, which is funny because I usually don’t feel like I have enough to write to fill up the assignment length. But I know you have lots of papers to read so I will stop there because if what I learned taught me anything then it taught me that people definitely don’t deserve any extra work to do. 

© Zac Walsh

Zac Walsh’s work has appeared in journals such as Two Thirds North, Phylum, Stonecoast, Caustic Frolic, Calliope, Gold Man Review, Last Leaves, Blue Unicorn, LUMINA, Gulf Stream, Cimarron Review, Oakwood, Alligator Juniper, The Awakenings Review, The Other Journal, The Blotter, Big Lucks, Dappled Things, Spectre Magazine, the DuPage Valley Review and The Platte Valley Review, as well as in the anthologies Extrasensory Overload, Blood on the Floor and Small Batch. He lives in a small, unincorporated town in Oregon with his wife and a very old dog. zacwalshwriting.com

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