When yours truly was a humble 5th grader, the sign-ups for the elementary school spelling bee were emailed to our parents. I was shocked to find that I had been entered in the bee, despite having neither inclination nor motivation to compete in said bee. When I asked my mom (aka Mother Ryu) about it, she dodged the question and gave me various assurances like “you’ll be great at it” and “we’ll study together.” But now that I think about it, she never confessed to entering me herself! What’s worse? She wouldn’t let me quit. I think visions of my glory had somehow been planted in her mind. She was always trying to get me to watch the movie Akilah and the Bee. That should have been a clue.
Even though I begged her to let me play outside or read Harry Potter, Mother Ryu would sit me down at the dining room table with the dreaded list of words and a box of Lucky Charms, and I would be transformed into a show dog named Pongo. If you’ll remember, the name originates from one of the characters in 101 Dalmatians, which I never saw because a certain someone never let me watch it. For each word that I spelled right, my mom would give me a cereal piece and praise me, saying “good Pongo!” or just “good dog!”
In retrospect, it seems rather humiliating. But in the moment, I just wanted to be a good dog. And for every difficult word I spelled, I got a marshmallow. My favorite was the rainbow (yes, I know they all taste the same). So maybe I was being strung along by the promise of different shapes of granulated sugar, but hey, I was ten! If I didn’t get the word right, I wouldn’t receive a marshmallow. I wouldn’t even receive a regular, lowly cereal piece. The logic was clear. A cereal piece was better than no cereal place, right?
This charade proceeded for an undetermined amount of time. (Mother Ryu won’t tell me how long we trained for.) But it was long enough for the memories to be burned into my brain forever. Each difficult word I missed was followed with the admonition that whichever word that eliminated me would be one I would “remember forever.” Thus, I arrived at the bee with the nagging feeling that this would be one of the most formative experiences of my life.
Was it? That’s debatable. I remember that my first word was waffle and that in the end, it came down to me and a fourth-grader. But I can’t remember the final word I misspelled, which calls into question which part of this experience was formative: the spelling bee or the dog training that preceded it. Maybe Pongo should have trained harder. Ruff.
