Archives: Knowing it all for a short while

First published in June, 1986.

The smartest I ever was, was on a Sunday morning in Texas, 25 years ago this month, walking across a warm and grassy courtyard toward the Abilene High School auditorium. I was about to be graduated from high school.

There were 560 of us in the auditorium that Sunday (minus the usual number of hoodlums skipping the ceremonies), quite a critical concentration of superiority, as graduating classes go.

I have a snapshot from the event, of me and my pals in the grassy courtyard, graduation robes slung over our forearms, grinning the grins of kids who have absolutely nothing further to learn.

And we didn't, for maybe three months, the most carefree of summers. Then there began an educational process, continuing to this day, concerning all the things we really didn't know, possibly still do not know, and may never, ever, know.

This was not unnatural. The unnatural thing would have been to sit in the auditorium that morning offhandedly aware that you did not know it all yet. There could have been two or three of those, who today are on their way to being such unnatural things as Supreme Court justices.

The rest of us may have switched horses since that verdant Sunday May morning. I was going to be a doctor; advertised it openly in fact. No one, peers or parents, said to me directly that I was crazy. If they had said to me, "You are going to flunk college chemistry as it has never been flunked before, and then you will become a newspaper columnist," I would have laughed my utterly confident laugh in their face and said, "See you in surgery, beetlehead."

The Sunday auditorium event was the baccalaureate. They may not do this anymore, but baccalaureate and commencement were separate events in those days, one in the auditorium on Sunday, the other in the stadium on Monday night.

At baccalaureate, the traditional sermon was delivered, of which I remember not a syllable. We bounced our gold tassels and spooled the programs, and watched the ushers, junior girls, the best and the brightest from that class, gliding along the aisles in white dresses.

My name in the program was appointed with all kinds of asterisks and daggers and stars, connoting me as one among the wonderfully smart. One had to be humble about this, though privately I counted the typographical salad as proof of my ascension to perfect knowledge.

But the writing was already on the wall. Some months earlier, the Scholastic Aptitude Test had asked me to define "thesaurus," and I blacked in the circle by "extinct reptile." Later, learning the truth, I responded from the summit, "Ah, what dummy would ever need a thesaurus anyway?"

I still tell people that I was smart in high school. For a long time I wondered how a kid so smart in high school could sink like an anchor as a freshman. It was years before I realized that high school asterisks and daggers connote nothing more than the difference between memory and intellect. If I had a word of counsel for smart seniors, that would be it.

The AHS auditorium is still there, filling higher and higher each June with new batches of great expectations, most of which are left behind. That is where most of mine still are. As far as I know, no one who was in the auditorium that morning in 1961 holds it against me.

It generally works out somehow. A quarter-century is plenty of time for this, if it is going to happen. I am not a doctor and the beetleheads were not crazy, and I have no complaints.

And it felt pretty good, those summer months of '61, knowing it all for a little while. Such confidence will not come this way again. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.

Present-day postscript: Boy, have I learned a lot since 1986. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.