Taken back and aback

Considering how empty my memory is, it is rather interesting that there is a specific incident from high school that I actually remember... at least... parts of it.

I think the class was English Literature. We were reading ... I'm not sure now... Macbeth or Hamlet or something else. Maybe it was just plain English class. I don't remember. Now that I think about it, I don't think if was Shakespeare. Anyways... when I received my graded assignment back from the teacher, he asked me if I had received help from Mr. X, another teacher... No, I said, taken aback... shocked even... Why would I get help from a teacher on interpreting something I had read? That bugged the hell out of me. I know I got an "A", but I can't remember if it was 98 or 100 per cent.

This came to mind because the other day I was nudged back to visit a site devoted to letters... plain ole written letters... correspondence if you will. There were a few that I was going to write about, but then another one caught my fancy... It was a letter written by a teacher to an author, and her response, the latter which is where my kinship lies. When I went googling for further information, the thing that struck me yet again was... she and I share the same birthday.

On a sidenote, I was rooting through a box of artwork and written stuff from high school wondering if I might find one of my English assignments, and I came across a four and a half page essay (not school related) on selfishness, humankind, and the earth, among other things. A bunch of personal crap mostly, but then, near the end, there was this:

"I know that some people can quit while they're ahead, while others just have to make fools of themselves by going too far. I guess fools should never be prominent people and prominent people shouldn't be fools."

I wrote that when I was sixteen.