I was not a self-assured little kid. I lived in the country and wasn’t particularly athletic, didn’t know my way around the terminology of machinery as it seemed my friends did. I was reticent in a crowd of my peers. But I was an early, voracious reader and I felt confident in the classroom.

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

At least until Mrs. Roberts assigned a coloring project that I blew.

Louise Roberts was my first grade teacher. She was lovely, kind and patient. But my most vivid memory of my nine months with her (not the same nine months as each of her sons experienced) is the zero she gave me on a coloring assignment.

I’m quite certain it was she who delivered my first academic trauma. First grade seems right for that kind of project. I doubt it was second grade, because Mrs. McGowan never would have given me a zero.

Mrs. McGowan lived in the county seat of Portage, 14 miles and a half century from my little school in Rio, and possessed a sense of savoir faire. She loved her students enough to invite a select few one at a time to her house in Portage overnight to give them a taste of “city life.” Portage had 10,000 people, to Rio’s 788.

I was one of the lucky chosen for an evening in Portage with Mrs. McGowan and her husband, a local official. She made dinner, then they drove me around the city, and introduced me to city hall and the jail. Come to think of it, maybe she was trying to “scare me straight.” Anyway, she was sweet enough that she would have given me a second chance, not a zero that haunts me 64 years later.

Mrs. Roberts’ assignment simply was to color the animals pictured on the white sheet of paper she distributed. I forget what all the animals were, but the ducks… oh, the ducks.

What color are ducks? In all of my six years of limited exposure to Disney and storybooks in which ducks floated in ponds near where Snow White lay waiting for the kiss that would bring her back to life, or beneath the tower that held Rapunzel, the ducks were white. Pure, innocent, naïve images floating blissfully about the main story characters to remind us that even when things appear to be going smoothly, we need to paddle like crazy.

The ducks I was to color were presented to me on a sheet of white paper. So, very logically, I colored the other animals and left the ducks alone. White ducks on white paper. That’s the color of ducks.

When I got the assignment back with a big ZERO on it, I had the temerity to ask Mrs. Roberts why. She said I didn’t do the assignment because I didn’t color the ducks.  “But ducks are white,” I said, a nascent lawyer arguing for the defense.

“You should at least have colored the bills and feet,” she said. I could see her point, but how about a second chance? Maybe they were albino ducks.

Fortunately, I recovered from that initial academic setback and grew up avoiding drugs, thievery, rock and roll and mayhem.

Thank you Mrs. McGowan.