Bud Grossmann’s Words of the Week for the Week of September 18, 2011 Previously unpublished fiction. © 2011 by Bud Grossmann. All Rights Reserved.   Grown Acorn, 2006 © 2006 by Bud Grossmann SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS Wednesday, September 14, 2011 1:00PM Good idea, your grandson’s taking a collapsible safety cone to first-grade math class. If any of W.’s classmates furnish incorrect answers during the lesson, the teacher will have ready access to a dunce cap. So how do you calculate the volume of a cone? No fair filling it with water and dumping it into a graduated bucket. No fair Googling the solution. No fair asking why I am asking. Oh, all right, I’ll tell you. I want to know what size kid’s head will fill it. Geometry was one of my favorite courses. I was the only freshman in a sophomore geometry class here at Fjord High. Lots of cute, playful girls among those sophomores. Miss Eleanor Jenkins, middle-aged but black-haired, was our teacher. I liked geometry, yes, and I liked Miss Jenkins. I thought of her as an old maid, slender and plain, stern and moustached. Decades later, when Miss Jenkins died, a sophomore girl mailed me the obit, which revealed that she had moved away, married, and taught for many years at another school. It didn’t say if the moustache paled as the years went by. I recently asked a sophomore girl, my age now plus one year more, if she had been in that class. She replied, “Oh, no, I was a farm girl.” I wasn’t quick enough to ask if that meant she’d been exempt because of the well-rounded education she got at home. I wasn’t quick enough to wonder about other lessons that gave farm girls advantages over girls from town. This Friday I intend to skip a visitation here in Fjord. The widow of a man who died a year ago or so is now gone. I possess a bundle of letters I received as a pen pal of one of their many daughters after my family moved to Maryland in my sophomore year. When the dad died, I glanced through the letters and chanced upon paragraphs I had not read in forty years but whose poignant details had persisted in my memory. I attended the old man’s visitation and spoke privately with the girl whose letters I hold. She insisted she had no recollection of me or of ever having written to me. It would be best, I concluded, not to revisit this particular past. Perhaps Nick and I will phone you Friday night, not too late, if you let us know you are at home and not entertaining gentleman callers. Oh! That sentence is tasty on my tongue! I like the verbed noun, phone, I like the adjective, gentleman, asymmetrically in the singular. And perhaps I like perhapses. Bye for now. Love, Dave P.S.: I remembered a riddle fit for a precocious first-grader. “What did the acorn say when it grew up?” ♦         ARCHIVES         Click for a list of other Words of the Week I would welcome your thoughts on this page (or any of my others).  Write to me at the following address.  Please be sure to spell Grossmann with two n’s and mention what page you are writing about. Thanks!  BUD GROSSMANN Top of this page | HOME | Fine Photography | Picture of the Day | Writings | | Words of the Week | Mom & Pop Prop. Mgt. | FAQ |

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