KC Scholarship

     Not always does your past come back to haunt you.

      It came in the mail in a big, white envelope, the kind with a bubble wrap lining inside.  Life insurance maybe, or a calendar or something, from somebody wanting money.  My first impulse was to head to the recycle bin with it. 

     There wasn’t an accompanying return envelope with a little checkoff box with suggested donations, no sob story with heart-rending pictures.  There was nothing in the envelope but the certificate inside a folder.

      I decided to keep it for a while.  I didn’t know any Cheryl McConnell.  Of course, I knew some Cheryls when I was teaching school.  Any of them could have changed their last names.

     Sure enough, a few days later, there came a letter from a Cheryl McConnell who signed her maiden name.  Sure enough, she was a former student who had graduated in the late 70’s.

     In her note, she explained that the KC Scholarship was funded in part by the Ewing Kaufman foundation, which triples her donations.  Apparently, Cheryl donated enough to allow her to select the name for the scholarship.  I was chosen for the honor.   

     She went on to say that I had taught valuable lessons, like how to write a term paper, or to have fun with literature.  And the really big one (my emphasis, not hers) “a lot” is two words, not one (like “a little, a gob, a bunch” are all two-word phrases, so is “a lot”).  “Allot” is one word and means something entirely different, to distribute, divide, spread, share and has nothing to do with a______lot, two separate words.  We all have our petty pet peeves, I guess.

     I can only imagine what kind of battle I would be fighting now if I were still teaching writing, text message abbreviations, u no what I mean?  LOL etc.  

      Texting does exemplify one thing I tried to teach, brevity.  Avoid wordiness.  The other part of that was to have a thought or feeling worthy of communicating.  Text receivers can be the judge of that.  I am spared that battle, anyhow.

     A certificate and a brief letter from a former student once again disinter memories of the long-buried past.  I am reminded of one more thing from my teaching career.  I once told a girl who had fallen in with the wrong crowd and was engaging in some questionable behaviors, that on judgment day, a huge Sony Jumbotron would flash her life across the sky for God and everybody, including her mother, to see.

      The Jumbotron may be replaced by a 5 x 5 card arriving in the mail some time before judgment day.  Not all the things coming across the screen will be bad or embarrassing.

       Disclaimer (following congress’s example):  I am exempt from any and all the rules of good writing that I used to try to teach.  I will be wordy if I wish, and I may express ideas that are totally without value, if I choose.