Whoa is me.

It should be noted (for this blog) that I am a horrible speller. Worse still? My grammar. I love language, but I abhor rules.

The 500 or so words that I do know how to spell can all be attributed to the scholarly skill of Mr. Gold at Woodinville Elementary School. Mr. Gold was consistently furious at my fifth grade class. It is probably accurate to say that Mr. Gold was furious at every fifth grade class he ever taught. In my memory, he appears as a gorgeous, malicious owl head teetering on a fit 80-year-old man’s body.

Owlman by James Todd

It is more likely that he was a normal looking 45-year-old guy with slightly bushy eyebrows (or owlbrows, as they are called in my house). I can’t imagine that Mr. Gold left twenty-eight 10-year olds alone in his classroom with any regularity, but I swear he was always exploding back into the room, screaming three words that would forever be seared into my tender brain: THE UNMITIGATED GALL.

Oh, Mr. Gold was a storm of a man. And as far as I knew, unmitigated gall was a term for the weather. In my imagination, he was basically screaming It’s raining cats and dogs! I was sure that a gall was a storm involving rain, and that unmitigated meant relentless. I knew that he was really telling us that we, as children, were pretty much unbearable and deserving of some deranged Roman form of punishment, but I couldn’t help it – I heard him yelling Unrelenting Tempest! each time he spat out that notable phrase. If I hadn’t been so helplessly impressed with him, I’m sure I would have burst out laughing. As an adult, I can’t find any dictionary mention of a gall being a term for a rainstorm, though I’m certain I’ve heard it used that way before. It only follows that if a windstorm is a gale, and rainstorm is a gall, right? I now understand that unmitigated means absolute, which isn’t so far from relentless if you really break it down.

For that one year of my life, I loved spelling. I can’t remember if I every achieved any fleeting success with it, but I do recall Mr. Gold’s unmitigated pleasure every time I stood up from my plastic chair and spelled something correctly. Though it was never directly communicated, I established that Mr. Gold’s love of language paralleled mine, with a larger desire for accuracy. Mr. Gold also taught me that, for the love of God, a zero is a ZERO, not an o. An o is a bloody letter, and you don’t find it anywhere in the numerical system unless you can only count to twenty and think that bellybutton lint is hi-larious. He might have also taught me that Velveeta is not actually cheese. At the end of the school year, I remember him placing his owl-hand on my shoulder and telling me that I was going to do just fine in Junior High School – after years of mooning away in a corner with the larger academic establishment fearfully assessing my dismal future, this was like winning the praise lottery. It turns out that Mr. Gold was more right about life than he was about my chances in Junior High School. And, as it turns out, I still can’t spell.

Luckily, I have a husband who doubles as an editor. He irons out all my ignorant decisions with his big brain and something called a Ph.D. – now if it were up to me, we’d pronounce that series of letters Phhhttd! simply to amplify the charm of their arrangement. My leanings in the arena of his fine education are not always admirable, though. When we were first dating, I accidentally told someone that he had a Ph.D. in psychology (it is really a Ph.D. in philosophy) and boy did he look peeved. After that, I would accidentally on purpose make the same mistake from time to time, always turning gleefully to see his scowl-y expression before he corrected my error. I should point out that David is not much of a scowler – when considering the variations in character among humans, David holds position firmly in the sweet, funny and smart categories. Can you really blame me for wanting to see this lighthearted chap occasionally screw his face up in contempt?

Did I also mention that he is very patient?

This is all to say that I beg your forgiveness for any and all errors that I make while I am here in the woods, away from my valiant and handsome editor. For your amusement, here is a video of David dancing.