Read Online Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Walter Kirn
Tags: United States, Literary, General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, 20th Century, Authors, American, Biography, Education, 21st Century, Higher, Walter - Childhood and youth, American - 20th century, Students, Students - United States, Students & Student Life, Kirn, American - 21st century
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in many volumes, of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire , its pages abundantly marked by strips of paper covered in minutely lettered comments. Her feats of amateur scholarship were purely private, though, and they went undiscussed with the neighbors or the rest of us, though I sensed that she hoped they’d rub off on us someday, and especially on me.
I was an eighth grader during our time in Phoenix, but only technically, since I rarely attended school in those strange months. I did, though, participate in a spelling bee. I memorized a booklet of tricky words which competitive spellers often stumbled over, won the local round, won the district round, and advanced to the final round for all of Phoenix. A lot of my rivals on the stage were Asians. Asians scared me. I’d never spoken to one. Finally there were just two of us onstage, me and an Asian girl not half my height. My word was “villain,” an easy one. I botched it. Nerves. The Asian girl didn’t botch her word. She hugged my waist. Then she was mobbed by dozens of her kin.
I had only my father there. “You had to be perfect,” he said. “You weren’t quite perfect. Sometimes there’s no in-between in life. I’m sorry.”
When I did go to school, I rarely attended class, preferring to meet up in the parking lot with a quiet Hopi friend who led me all over Phoenix on his bike, showing me where his aunts and uncles lived, shouting threats when he passed a Navajo kid, and sometimes giving me one of the blue pills he kept in a Baggie in his shorts. The pills made me mournful. Mournful, but outgoing.
“What do you want to be someday?” I asked him.
“Hopi.”
“You’re Hopi now.”
“And Hopi always.”
“You want to know my goal?” I asked him.
He seemed indifferent.
“A newspaper columnist who gives opinions.”
“Telling people what you think.”
“Exactly.”
“I hate to think. I like to see.”
I might have avoided much sorrow down the line by adopting the outlook of my Hopi friend, but I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him. When I got home that afternoon, the cab and the trailer were attached again and we were headed back to the Midwest. My mother had taken control. She’d called her father in Ohio, who’d called 3M in Minnesota and convinced them to give my father his old job back.
Weeks later, we bought our farm in Taylors Falls, a team of draft horses, some old machinery, a dozen chickens, a goat, and my father resumed his commute to the Twin Cities, stranding the rest of us in the nineteenth century and leaving my brother and me to the devices of one of Minnesota’s lowest-ranked schools. Its dullness revived my interest in Mormonism.
The ward house was located in a St. Paul suburb. I dressed for services in burgundy loafers, a knit red tie, and a blue dress shirt whose stain-resistant finish reacted with sweat to create a spoiled-meat smell. By then my parents were drifting toward full apostasy (my little brother had dropped out entirely) and they only came to church when the bishop scheduled me to speak. In Phoenix, I’d become quite a Sunday speaker, and I got even better in St. Paul.
“To want what another has is to lose the bounty which Heavenly Father grants equally to all of us and cannot be added to, only subtracted from, never burnished but only soiled: the chance for our spirit to know Celestial glory and govern dominions of our own creation, much as Heavenly Father governs ours.”
Establish a cadence, stretch it, vary it, return to it later in full force, and try not to think the words. That was the secret, I discovered. The words were interchangeable, anyway, particularly if they were fine or lofty words. “Holy,” “sacred,” “blessed,” “delightsome,” “pure.” Their potency lay not in their meanings but in the patterns they cut into the air. When I was speaking in top form, these patterns seemed to precede the words, in fact, drawing them out of me like melodies writing their own
I was an eighth grader during our time in Phoenix, but only technically, since I rarely attended school in those strange months. I did, though, participate in a spelling bee. I memorized a booklet of tricky words which competitive spellers often stumbled over, won the local round, won the district round, and advanced to the final round for all of Phoenix. A lot of my rivals on the stage were Asians. Asians scared me. I’d never spoken to one. Finally there were just two of us onstage, me and an Asian girl not half my height. My word was “villain,” an easy one. I botched it. Nerves. The Asian girl didn’t botch her word. She hugged my waist. Then she was mobbed by dozens of her kin.
I had only my father there. “You had to be perfect,” he said. “You weren’t quite perfect. Sometimes there’s no in-between in life. I’m sorry.”
When I did go to school, I rarely attended class, preferring to meet up in the parking lot with a quiet Hopi friend who led me all over Phoenix on his bike, showing me where his aunts and uncles lived, shouting threats when he passed a Navajo kid, and sometimes giving me one of the blue pills he kept in a Baggie in his shorts. The pills made me mournful. Mournful, but outgoing.
“What do you want to be someday?” I asked him.
“Hopi.”
“You’re Hopi now.”
“And Hopi always.”
“You want to know my goal?” I asked him.
He seemed indifferent.
“A newspaper columnist who gives opinions.”
“Telling people what you think.”
“Exactly.”
“I hate to think. I like to see.”
I might have avoided much sorrow down the line by adopting the outlook of my Hopi friend, but I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him. When I got home that afternoon, the cab and the trailer were attached again and we were headed back to the Midwest. My mother had taken control. She’d called her father in Ohio, who’d called 3M in Minnesota and convinced them to give my father his old job back.
Weeks later, we bought our farm in Taylors Falls, a team of draft horses, some old machinery, a dozen chickens, a goat, and my father resumed his commute to the Twin Cities, stranding the rest of us in the nineteenth century and leaving my brother and me to the devices of one of Minnesota’s lowest-ranked schools. Its dullness revived my interest in Mormonism.
The ward house was located in a St. Paul suburb. I dressed for services in burgundy loafers, a knit red tie, and a blue dress shirt whose stain-resistant finish reacted with sweat to create a spoiled-meat smell. By then my parents were drifting toward full apostasy (my little brother had dropped out entirely) and they only came to church when the bishop scheduled me to speak. In Phoenix, I’d become quite a Sunday speaker, and I got even better in St. Paul.
“To want what another has is to lose the bounty which Heavenly Father grants equally to all of us and cannot be added to, only subtracted from, never burnished but only soiled: the chance for our spirit to know Celestial glory and govern dominions of our own creation, much as Heavenly Father governs ours.”
Establish a cadence, stretch it, vary it, return to it later in full force, and try not to think the words. That was the secret, I discovered. The words were interchangeable, anyway, particularly if they were fine or lofty words. “Holy,” “sacred,” “blessed,” “delightsome,” “pure.” Their potency lay not in their meanings but in the patterns they cut into the air. When I was speaking in top form, these patterns seemed to precede the words, in fact, drawing them out of me like melodies writing their own
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