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THIS IS THE STORY of two contests in which I competed in the fifth grade. One, probably the more important, was a competition for the love of Veronica McCall. This was a competition that I sponsored, but I was never a serious contender in it myself at all, which is probably as it should have been, since I didn’t really understand what prize was at stake, did not, to tell a truth that I would have been too embarrassed to tell at the time, even want to understand what prize was at stake, because I did understand that it was a variety of love for which I hadn’t yet developed an appetite.
In the manner of a chowder, which is a complex and subtle mixture of elemental foodstuffs, the emotion that we call love is a bewildering and varied concoction of more elemental emotions: lust, friendship, curiosity, guilt, and fear, among others. Tastes in chowders vary from person to person, from nation to nation, from region to region; one’s own taste in chowder changes over the course of one’s lifetime, and it may even shift from day to day. So it is with tastes in love. Some like theirs chock full of voluptuous scarlet tomatoes; others prefer something rarer, more exotic, heady with saffron; and still others like theirs bland and sturdy, with cream and potatoes.
My tastes and Veronica’s were different because I was two years younger than she, and at the time they were an especially important two years. Those two years represented the Gulf of Puberty, not so wide a gulf, but one where the waters can be treacherous, and where the fog is often so thick that one can’t see from one shore to the other. When I finally began to get a fuzzy notion of what Veronica wanted from a boyfriend (however fuzzy her desires might still have been) I began looking for someone who might be able to take the job away from me.
The other contest seemed much simpler on the surface, but I soon found that I had underestimated its demands. Not long after I had entered it, I found myself wishing that I could withdraw from this one too. It was the contest to name the new school.
Because of a rapid increase in Babbington’s population, a new upper-elementary school was being built at what was almost the geographical center of Babbington, and boys and girls from all over town would attend the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades there. The three small existing elementary schools—two old ones in the old town and one fairly new one in Babbington Heights—would be used only by children in the lower grades.
Work on the new school had begun the year before. During the summer, when it looked for a while as if the school might actually be completed before the fall, the announcement of the name-the-school contest appeared in the Babbington Reporter, and it sent a ripple of excitement through the upper-elementary-school population of Babbington.
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🎧 158: This is the story . . .