Hitting you with knowledge

I was submerged in thought, stuck in science class, trying to calculate what earthly forces and universal laws mattered in my pre-teenage skull.

All I knew was that my guesswork would get the teacher's red pen for cluelessness, so I clenched my paper handout of half answers into a ball and picked up my book.  The scientific tome had the bulk of a tool – or a weapon. 

If nothing else, I could use it to fend off a burglar who might sneak through my bedroom window and steal my perfectly corrected homework, when the teacher next asked about it. It had size and heft, but the glossy cover proved slippery. 

The balled-up instructions, meanwhile, were so light that when pitched by my friend and supposed study partner, the unsturdy, makeshift baseball took on a strange trajectory to the plate, catching odd breezes that welled up in the classroom. The paper fluttered and fell like a spitball, without, thankfully, any saliva. 

I took several unsuccessful swings, studying the paper ball's tumbling, wavering flight path. Down two strikes, I knew the next pitch was the game ender, the awestruck crowd silencer, a walk-off shot into the deep, where it had never gone before, to the surprise of onlookers, who hadn't seen such a spectacular play coming. 

In a sense I was correct.

The book and all its contents slipped out of my grasp. I had lost grip of the material. Not only metaphorically.

Physics and geometry were surely involved, as well as gravitational pull, when the weighty science text gained velocity like a comet flying into the heat of the sun. 

I had discovered some new dimension. Time had slowed, almost to a stop. Could I, with my mind, halt or redirect the descending violence?  Might it hook to the side at the very last moment? 

The text hung in the air, its unread pages flapping. Then, all of a sudden, in a fraction of a second, the book reentered reality and the relentlessness of cause and effect. If time and motion had before slowed, now the book instantly regained momentum in an accelerated descent.

The teacher began to speak, signaling that the class lecture was resuming. A quiet boy on the far side of the room turned to face the teacher, to absorb the lesson, just as my book slapped him across the face. Though I wanted to cry in shame, it was the boy who wept, publicly.

I at least understood the gravity of my situation. And the potential energy, the opposite and equal reaction of my impending punishment. A poetically apt retribution hung in the air – now they were going to throw the book at me.

The boy’s contusion would pale next to what I would face. But when an assigned text is flipped through the air, rather than the more traditional scene of a student flipping through it in scholastic devotion … well, you must learn a lesson, one way or another.

Time again moved strangely, as I waited with dread in the principal’s office for my bureaucratic haranguing. I ruminated over the diabolically elaborate nature of my comeuppance.  Perhaps a medieval torture rack, with a complex system of pulleys grinding my bones, of which I knew not the names; or being compelled to sweat out crucial but obscure minerals and vitamins in a hot box fashioned by sadists in woodworking class; or would it be a boiling cauldron burbling with experimental acids; maybe electrical currents affixed to my temples to shock some sense into me. I was never so creatively thorough when it came time for classwork.

I sat before the towering figure of my principal, who teemed with institutional power. With a grave face, he sighed and cleared his throat.

"So … I’m concerned ... with what I’ve heard happened.” 

My head fell. A great weight was upon me. Could I survive life with no more than a seventh-grade education? 

“So, your roller skates were stolen, huh?”

The clouds of doom evaporated.  Wait. What?

They had the wrong guy, for the wrong crime. I was as buoyant as if I had huffed helium, though I was not that sort of delinquent. Who needed roller skates? I floated home.

These days I wait for my pitch. I still swing and miss, but I practice better form in the follow through. 

I still give no flying flip about teenage biochemistry. Though with or without my participation in accredited book learning, my brain and physical impulses metamorphosized and would again, so that I now cannot at all understand the former young person I once was.

If I was as sarcastic and selfish as I was then, maybe I might note that adults too can be scattered and beyond understanding, that they aren’t always organized, keeping detailed, and accurate notation. They too make mistakes in their conclusions and paperwork. 

Maybe much of life is luck, good and bad, and is aimed at us from the cosmos in some brain-racking test that we try to delay and ignore. 

Sometimes you make a dedicated effort, just at a misguided goal, sometimes it slips out of your hands, sometimes injustice slaps you in the face, and sometimes the guilty are spared. Not out of pity or some grander lesson, just through an administrative oversight. 

Still, sometimes the guilty can learn. They can change. 

I wonder if the other boy ever thinks about any of this. I hope he’s doing OK. Maybe he understands the world more than I do. Maybe he’s a scientist.

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