Underachiever

Public school was always the place where I got to shine. And by shine I mean demonstrate my infallible ability to disappoint. I had been labeled an ‘underachiever’ very early on and have managed to maintain that standing pretty much my entire life so far. Even my kidneys are underachieving, having recently been rejected for transplant for my younger brother (sorry, Mark).

I knew from an early age that education was prized in my household. My father was pressured by his mother to become a doctor, a folly he realized after several semesters of college before he quit to join the family hardwood flooring business. I also knew from 2^nd grade onward that I would never live up to anyone’s expectations for my academic career and that I was destined to disappoint anyone who dared invest their academic hopes in me, just like my father before me.

Oh come on, the skeptical reader might be, ought to be, thinking, how could you have possibly known in second grade? How old were you, seven?

Because of the math incident, that’s how I knew. Now the math incident was not nearly as traumatic as the Great Hebrew School Flabberfuck that was still to come, but it was still disquieting for a little boy and it was the most important lesson I ever learned in school.

In 1967 I first knew love, in the form of Mrs. Tufaro, 2^nd grade teacher at Barnum Woods Elementary School. I knew she was married but I did not care. She was probably no more than fifteen years older than I and she was beautiful. She was short, but not too short for me, with dark hair in a shoulder length flip and an off-center part. I distinctly remember her black cat-eye glasses and the softness of her voice. I also remember one of the greatest days of my young life when we took a field trip to the Central Park Zoo and I got to hold her hand all day long. I could not say what I may have seen of the zoo but I can tell you that her touch was a delight that conveyed me to a world beyond. I remember nothing of that day but her soft warm hand and the willingness she had to share it with me whenever I reached for it. That she would put up with a sticky little boy like me for an entire day speaks of her generosity of spirit.

My other obsession as a young lad was the space program. As most boys in the 1960s I eagerly absorbed facts about the cosmos. I knew all about planetary movement in our solar system, the distance to the moon, the ovoid shape of the earth, the impenetrable cloud cover of Venus, the searing temperatures of Mercury, the many moons of Jupiter, and all other manner of space esoterica. What Westerns were to my predecessors in the 40s and 50s, space was to me. Space was my frontier, the promise of space travel was a promise made to my generation.

As any obsessed youngster I could name each astronaut in our space program and every kind of rocket NASA ever constructed. I had assembled and painted scale models of most of them from kits. I had saved and scrimped pennies in order to buy real working rockets from the Estes Corporation. I bought a launcher and the largest models I could afford. Off we would traipse, my friends and I, to the schoolyard on Saturday afternoons, lugging all our equipment with us. We would check the wind speed and direction and ready our bikes to ride swiftly to the recovery. We would carefully select passengers from the menagerie of toads and salamanders that lived in the nearby woods. We would use oversize engines in the quest to gain higher and higher altitudes. We knew that the distance to the moon would soon be breached, if not by us then by other intrepid explorers. We shared distant hopes of reaching the ionosphere, we dared dreamed of geo-synchronous orbits. What if we could place our little rocket in a spot in the sky that would follow us for the rest of our lives? Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing ever?

I knew of geo-synchronous orbits for this was the satellite age. Every kid knew that the gloomy specter of Russia’s Sputnik overhead was the impetus for our own space program. I also knew how satellites needed to be 26,200 miles above the earth in order to match the earth’s rotation and stay in the same spot relative to the earth. In knowing about the rotation of the earth I knew that a day was not 24 hours long. Oh no, in second grade I was aware that we had kind of been lied to. A day was really 24 hours and 59 seconds long but every day for four years we pretend away the 59 seconds until we brought them back all at once to give them their very own special day, February 29^th.

So when Mrs. Tufaro, my second obsession, put a question on a quiz about my first obsession, “How many hours are there in 2 days,” I eagerly set out to impress her. Here, finally, was my chance to rise above, to demonstrate my intellect and scholarship. Quickly working out the fancy mathematics I rendered the precise answer; 48 hours, 1 minute, 58 seconds and entered it on the quiz sheet.

Hope is a terrible thing. Hope is what we are left with when reason has already ruled out any possible positive outcome. People will often say, in the grimmest of situations, “At least we still have hope.” That’s an awful thing to say because what they really mean is, “Well, we know we are totally screwed on this, but we still harbor a remote fantasy that everything will come out alright.” When we have to resort to hope, everything is already lost, except our denial. I’m happy to say that I had no need for hope that day because I was right. I had facts in my corner and "facts are stubborn things,” as John Adams once noted. There was no denying the physics that govern the movement of this planet. I was going to demonstrate that advanced knowledge to the woman I loved, and she was going to be suitably impressed and I would be admired by my peers for my intellect and derring-do.

I knew I was right because I was cribbing my answer off Copernicus. Copernicus is celebrated for mathematically proving heliocentrism, that nagging little fact that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way ‘round, but they rarely tell you the whole story about him in school. Copernicus lived in the 15^th century world where science was strictly controlled by the Church which maintained an earth-centric view of the universe. I don’t mean ‘maintained,’ like the way the Parks Department ‘maintains’ the bike trails, I mean maintained as in enforced a particular perspective upon pain of iron mask. Contradicting the Church led to charges of heresy; charges of heresy were followed quickly by misplacement of one’s head by the authorities. Copernicus was so afraid of the personal consequences of his discovery that he delayed publication of his work for over 30 years until he was at the natural end of his life. It is said apocryphally that he was handed the first copy of his book on his deathbed.

(This episode begs a question of the Church: Why is that God neglected to tell us that we were not the center of the universe? What’s that about? (And don’t even get me started about the whole flat earth thing.) I mean, in Exodus, God spends 77 paragraphs describing the tabernacle he wants built with almond blossom this and silver candlestick that and He could not be bothered to give us a simple, "Oh BTW, the earth is round" or "The center of the universe is trillions of miles from here and you guys really live in a dusty corner that no one ever looks in." All those thousands of years talking to prophets and nary a word. You'd think, at the very least, that He might want to mention it to His only son, to whom He was bequeathing this erstwhile flat kingdom. Nope. God just let the One True Church (and it’s infallible Pope) prattle on and on for a dozen centuries about how the earth is the center of it all when all along the pagans and worshipers of Ra had it right from the beginning. Is that what Yeats really meant when he said, ‘the center does not hold?’ Is Truth the rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem? I wonder….).

It is commonly said that seven is the age of reason, that at seven-years-old we start to become aware of the greater world around us and we begin to have the capacity to understand some of the complexities of the world. I think I can rightly claim that was true of me; I was no fool. I knew the answer my teacher was looking for but I also knew that despite her expectation, the truth was more important and she would see it that way too. She would look at my answer and reverse engineer my logic and say to herself, ‘Ha, clever boy, he knows all about the movement of the earth and why we have leap year.’ And I would be rewarded with her smile and her knowledge that I was different and yes, better, than my classmates.

Disappointment is a terrible thing. It’s on the list right after hope, just before disillusionment. I knew I was right and Mrs. Tufaro, my first love (after Lana Wilson in 1st grade, but that was more of a school-boy crush; this was the real thing.), broke my heart and made it clear to me that school is not unlike the Church of Copernicus’s time: they know what all the answers are and any contradictory facts you care to promulgate will be treated as heresy. Truth need not lurk about the classroom lest it find itself with a hood thrown over its head and dragged off to some damp boiler room for ‘enhanced interrogation.’

Without surprise, the quiz came back with my answer all marked up in red ink. That moment quashed any inclination I had to play their game and I became a committed C-minus student, paying just enough attention to get by. I embraced under-achievement as an art form and swore to over-achieve at it; if they allocated GPA scores for under-achieving mine would be 4.0. The sadder part of this tale though is that neither my teacher nor my parents asked me why I put down such a blatantly wrong answer; all they could see was that I was wrong.

We tend think of disillusionment as a negative thing when in fact it is a kissing cousin to enlightenment; one cannot become enlightened without first removing ones illusions. Oscar Wilde said, “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” His implication was that one holds illusions as an indulgence of misbegotten beliefs or fantasies; in that respect we should seek out disillusionment whenever possible. To be disillusioned is to have learned something about the world and ourselves. It took me until adulthood to appreciate the unintentional favor my teacher did for me.

Out of this episode of disappointment and disillusionment sprouted the seedling that would become my oaken reputation for mathematical ineptitude which in turn would bear fruit of hilarity in my adult years. In my mid-thirties in the mid-nineties I landed a mid-level management position with a Denver company. I would be responsible for managing multi-million dollar data conversion contracts with the world’s largest airlines. The job paid $50K a year which back then was a pretty good wage for a high-school dropout, an ineluctable underachiever, trying to pass himself off in the white-collar world. It was the most money I had ever made outside of some consulting work I had done for Grumman Aerospace. This was a big step up in the world for me, I would need a passport for travel to customers in South America and Europe. I had to buy my first suit and I even bought a forty-dollar silk tie to go with it. I was pretty damn proud of myself.

When I reported this achievement on the phone to my mother she did not offer congratulations, she did not express her pride at this career milestone, she did not wish me good luck, fare thee well, glad tidings. When I told my mother of this good news she responded with, “Well, Jon, I hope they don’t make you do math. You were never very good at math.”

That punch line was set up thirty years earlier when I was in second grade. It's almost as if my seven-year-old self had succeeded in putting a little rocket in geo-synchronous orbit over my head to follow me for the rest of my life and it has a little streamer unfurled behind it that reads, "Sucks at math."