Have you ever had one of those moments where something happens to remind you what an arrogant know-it-all you were as a teenager? How you had your whole life in front of you and you could see the starting line, the road, the finish line, and everything in between. Then today, you realize how naive you really were and the people trying to help you weren't that 'stupid' after all. This is my (long) story.
In high school, Brown and I did everything we could to get a day out of school. We joined each club not to put it on our college entrance applications but because most clubs had at least one day you got out of school. I was the president of the science club because we went to Louisiana Tech twice a year to the planetarium. I was on the yearbook staff for 4 years because I loved getting out of school to sell ads door to door at businesses. FBLA had a day out of school for a competition. I did not take one business class in high school unless typing was classified as such. By the by, I won the typing award that year with my robust 76 words/minute. Back to the story, we were not going to be future business leaders of America but we had to find a niche to get out of school.
We had two best friends in high school that were girls. Jill and Denise were kind of our "at school" best friends. We didn't really hang out much outside of school. Their boyfriends weren't good friends and my girlfriend was in college and it's really hard to be friends with attractive girls outside of school when your girlfriend isn't there and you've been elected "Biggest Flirt" in Who's Who of Junction City High. That's a round about way of saying after school liaisons were discouraged by said girlfriend. At school the four of us were never far apart probably because we seemed to have every class together our last 2 years of high school. Some classes were pretty small-our journalism class had only 4 other people in there with us. Wait, is journalism a business class? Surely not.
I'm pretty sure it was their idea to do the Parliamentary Procedure team and somehow the FBLA sponsor allowed us to not only do it but to independently study for the competition. It was a 4 person team and we were given a room and some books on PP and an hour a week to 'study.' Do you know what happens when you put 4 best friends in a room away from classes that actually give grades? Strawberry Shortcake cartoons would have held our attention longer.
A few months later we went to the competition. It was a written test. I didn't read 10% of the questions. I had no idea what they were asking and I was out of school, ergo I really didn't care. I think I turned my test in after 15 minutes or so. Brown came out about 2 minutes later. Jill and Denise came out about an hour later. At the awards ceremony, imagine our astonishment when we placed third. God sometimes has a crazy sense of humor.
Unbelievably we got to go to the state competition in Little Rock. Not only did we get out of school but we got out TWO DAYS and we stayed at the Excelsior all on the school's dime. With our new opportunity to make the school proud, Brown and I spent the night before our competition drinking a smuggled case of beer on our balcony. The next day we showed up for the competition where we drew a number. Come to find out, the state competition is not a written test but an exhibition where we were to hold a meeting with the judges who had given us a lovely packet of minutes, new business, old business, etc.
If the story to now hasn't made it clear yet----we had no idea how to hold a meeting. We truly didn't know what we were doing. We had never even seen a meeting with PP rules, all we had was a book we were supposed to learn from. We were like 4 deer caught in the headlights of a truck fleet. As group after group had their turns before us we were in serious debate over how to handle the situation. Eventually Brown and I won the argument and we walked out. That's right. We just left. The sponsors weren't there. We obviously wouldn't place so we went back to our main group and told them we weren't that good and doubt we won anything.
Well, to try to keep this story to under 30 minutes, the results were listed and instead of listing just the winners they gave scores to everyone except the nice "Did not compete" beside the Junction City team. Of course, Brown and I did the right thing and took the full blame for us leaving. We pleaded our case that we had no idea what we were doing. The other teams were in suits for goodness sake, how could we compete against that? We weren't in any real trouble since we didn't really break any rules and we didn't have any business classes or anything for them to take anything out on us.
However, I still remember the conversation with the teacher/sponsor, Mrs. Roland. The conversation in question was a version of the classic teacher to student- why do you not take anything seriously and going through life like things are a game blah blah blah etc. etc. etc. I remember sitting through the whole thing and then saying in a respectful way-the truth. I told her I didn't care about this and I only did it to get out of school. She then gave me the classic teacher to student-I'm so disappointed in you blah, blah, blah, etc. etc. etc. When she saw that line of talking was getting her nowhere, she pulled the teacher's final standby talk-This is important. Someday the things you learn here will blah, blah, blah, etc. etc. etc. I really was not the best teenager when it came to respecting authority.
Since all the conversation was cliched I pulled out the old student standby-"I will never use this stuff in my life....EVER!" I think I said something else about stuffy old rules and how the little bit I did learn just showed me how silly this stuff was and nobody really uses this stuff in real life. I'm making it sound like it was a yelling match or something. It wasn't. It was a teacher trying to help a know-it-all teenager who needed a good smack upside the head. I really thought I was so much smarter than her and all the rest of my teachers (In my defense, time has proven that I was smarter than a couple of them :) ). She was trying to help me see past my own nose and I didn't buy any of it. We got along famously before and after this 'incident.' She lives in NW Arkansas now and I've seen and spoken to her several times so I know there were never any hard feelings. She's remarried and I can't remember her new name or I'd say it here.
All of this recently went through my mind like a flood as I sat in a Komen steering committee meeting. As I lowered my hand after seconding a motion to approve the minutes from last month's meeting, all these events came back and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
Life as a road is an overused analogy but it's true in so many respects. We place our foot on a path that leads to our desired destination, but we can't predict the twists, turns, forks, and roadblocks we'll have along the way. I would have bet my left arm what I said to Mrs. Roland that day would be true. I don't think there was a thing in the world she could have said or done (short of a crystal ball) to change my mind. Life's lessons sometimes are slow in the learning and I can be as slow as anyone out there, but 17 years later I finally got this one.
