As a student, I was a bit of a handful. I’ve always had a gnawing hunger to learn things, but an almost equally strong urge to buck authority. Well, arbitrary authority at any rate. My so-called permanent record was (note the tense, kids) stuffed full of commendations and disciplinary notes in equal measure, if not equal use of euphemistic adjectives. Yet I loved school, and excelled at it. The kids are alright! School’s out forever! ¡Viva La Vevolucion! I’m taking math this summer for extra credit!

As Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (suck it, losers.)”  That’s from memory, so I may be misquoting him ever so slightly. 

One couplet I definitely can quote accurately from memory is one of my all-time favourites from that same poem:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. 

That was it. Right there. Reading that in grade school was the first time poetry actually spoke to me. Those lines were the first to resonate with me, to urge me to action, although quite what action I should take I wasn’t sure. Poetry as a force, an impetus, the way I later learned that satire was supposed to be when I read Swift and Pope. But those beautiful, ugly fellows and their sad, funny words came much later. First it was just me and ol’ Walt W. in the big round library pit in the centre of Mill Valley Public School.

At the very last second of lunch break I swallowed great gulps of orange soda then carefully, carefully, ever so carefully walked back to my desk, my belly a carbon dioxide time bomb. I was a Grade 6 version of The Wages of Fear, minus the French melodrama but with all the suspense. I churned with potential energy as I lowered myself into the chair.

I waited just long enough for Mr. Richards to turn around and begin to scrape white chalk on the green blackboard. Then I raised my arms akimbo and shook my belly to build up huge hippopotamus gas ball inside me, rising and growing and rising and growing and rising and–

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWP!

I think it wasn’t actually the belch that got me in trouble. It probably wasn’t even the cacophonous laughter of my classmates. I bet it wasn’t even my triumphant look of delight, although that couldn’t have helped.

It was the fact that when Mr. Richards spun around to see whose foghorn had just gone off, young Carrington sat tall in his chair with his arms still stretched out to the sides as if to say “Ta da!”

And that’s when I did the Jazz hands.

Did I get detention? I got multitudes.