THE FIRST TIME I TRIED TO KILL MYSELF

Photo: Skitch at Fifteen

THEN:

     The first time I tried to kill myself, I was fifteen years old. Looking back I think, "What the hell was I thinking?!" Life was hard, yeah, and it was going to get harder, but it was also going to get easier. Life was and is also full of wonder and beauty. It's interesting, hopeful, breathtaking. Life is so many things, some hideous and some splendorous, and everything in between. But over all, if you just learn to look at the blessings more than the burdens, life is awesome!  

     But I did not know that then, and I suppose, that the better question is, "What was I feeling?" My emotions were spent, tangled, tragic. I felt so alone and sad. I would wake up crying in agony from stomach pain. I kept blisters inside my mouth and had recently had a painful bout of shingles. The doctor had put me on "pre-ulcer" pills for anxiety, along with an assortment of other medications. I was concerned that my small nieces and nephew might get into my meds, so I kept them locked up in a tool box in my room. This also gave me my first taste of privacy. I'd lived in a shotgun house (which is an Appalachian term that means you could stand at one end of the house and shoot a shotgun out the front door without hitting a wall.) It was made up of one room after another with only the bathroom having a door. My sister and I had learned to dress and undress under our nightgowns, that's how little privacy we had. And my mother would not hesitate to read your letters or your journals, so we did not have that sort of privacy either. But now I had this box, obtained with the excuse of keeping the kids out of my pills, and I kept letters from school, my journals, my poetry, and my pills in it. When I did share my poetry with anyone the first words out of their mouths were in reference to how "morbid" or "depressing" the poem was. I tried to write happy poems but I just couldn't find any inside me. 

     One night I was particularly sad. I didn't understand it then, and it took me years to understand that night and what I did, but I had all these thoughts and emotions that I couldn't make sense of. I had this new sexuality that (I had thought) was supposed to be fun, but so far it just left me feeling like a piece of meat, like my identity had been scooped out and all that was left was a hole most of the men in my life were trying to find. I had a cousin that was much older than me. He had told me he would "be the brother you never had," but suddenly my "brother" was asking me to run away with him and marry him, telling me he "ached for me". I'm not saying I was particularly innocent in the situation. I tried to play him like a drum. I was angry that my identity had been scooped out, that my soul was empty, and I wanted something in return. What could I get for a smile or a flirtatious word? What would he give me for a glimpse of my cleavage? Something needed to fill the emptiness inside my heart, and I thought it was only fitting that this new sexuality stuff should buy whatever could fill me back up, but that wasn't working and I knew it.

     I had suffered from insomnia all my life, but once I went to sleep I hated to wake up. I had recently slept for sixteen hours and when my mother woke me up I complained. I told her later that I'd like to sleep for a hundred years. She looked at me from her sick bed, deep in the arms of nerve pills and anti anxiety medications, and told me that what I was talking about was a death wish. I wondered if it was. She also told me that my penchant for black clothes told the world that I was morbid and depressed, that I wanted to die. Maybe, I thought, maybe she was right. I did wear a lot of black. I loved it. I had stomach issues. I wrote morbid poems. I hated being a girl. I didn't know how to fill my hollow insides back up. I was lonely and felt hopeless. I wanted to sleep for a hundred years. Maybe death was indeed the answer.

     I wondered about all that while looking at a palm full of multi colored pills. I'd poured some from each of the bottles in my toolbox. They made art in my hand, but someone would probably tell me that my thinking of pills as art was a death wish, or morbid. I wondered if I was afraid of death? I didn't think so. I wondered if I had a reason to not swallow all those pills, and for the life of me, at that moment, I couldn't think of a single one. So, I took them. It took two glasses of water to swallow them all. I moved to the kitchen in the dark and refilled my glass as I'd done many times before, and swallowed the last of them. Then I sat on the couch in the dark living room, and listened to my cousins' boom box, and watched the lights that lit up to match the beat. 

     Too late I thought of music, of all the songs that would be written and sung that I would never hear. I thought of all the smiles I'd never see or have, children I might have been blessed with, a husband that loved me. All the good things I'd hoped for were slipping out of my grasp... Maybe I'd live through it?

     I sat there and listened to music in the dark and I thought about the sunshine, about Christmas mornings, about horses, puppies, and kittens, about good books, and good films, about my nieces and my nephew, my sisters, my dad, even my mom. "Too late," I thought. "Too late." I'd taken the pills and they would take their toll, whatever it might be.

     Within less than thirty minutes my heart began to pound. It was odd that, at first I didn't even notice, and then it startled me. I realized that I didn't know anything about killing yourself with pills. What if you don't just go to sleep and never wake up? What if you vomit and have diarrhea? What if you have pain and panic? What if you live through it and you have lost part of your brain, lost more of yourself than I already had? 

     The pills were making me sleepy. My head was nodding and my heart was hammering. What an odd combination. My head did not need my heart to settle down in order to sleep, but suddenly I knew that I did not want to go to sleep and die! I crawled up on the arm of the couch in order to be less comfortable, to stay awake and alive. I began to pray. I asked God to forgive me for being stupid, to help me live, to help me not have to wake, frighten, and hurt my parents, to help me, to help me, to help me!

     It was quite a while before my heart slowed just a tad, but I grasped at that with optimism. Surely I was going to live? I slid down on the couch and surrendered to sleep. 

     When I woke the next morning, I felt a jolt of hope that I'd not felt in months. I thanked God for helping me live. Maybe I'd lost part of myself, maybe being a girl was not what I'd wanted and wasn't easy, maybe life was tough, but I swore right then and with a thankful heart to be tougher even than life itself. 

THAT KIND OF GIRL

Photo: "Steele Paddling"
Taken by a sweet friend

THEN:

    I grew up in the "spare the rod and spoil the child," years when Appalachian parents and schools meeted out strict corporal punishment for any kids that didn't understand that children should be seen and not heard. The idea that a shepherd does not beat his flock with the rod, but instead gives them guidance, had not occurred to anyone I knew, including my own parents and every teacher that I heard express an opinion on the subject believed in strict physical punishment.

    A paddle hung in many of the classrooms as a constant reminder of what you risked if you dared to disagree. The most formidable ones had holes in them or tape wrapped around them. Teachers with holes or tape were serious about inflicting pain. My first teacher didn't even have a paddle and the only physical punishment I got from her was near the end of the school year, right before summer break. My normally sweet teacher bent my hand back and smacked my palm hard, three times with a ruler. I loved my first grade teacher, but I felt she should have understood that a bird flying around in the gymnasium ceiling was much more interesting than a visiting choir group. I simply could not sit still, be quiet, and watch a bunch of high school kids singing when there  was a tragedy going on right in front of me. That poor little bird was trapped inside the school. It might die of hunger, thirst, or even fright! And everyone was ignoring it!

    I suspected, even then, that I would not have been punished if my teacher's sister hadn't been among the singing troupe. She had admonished us before the program to be on our best behavior because her sister would be singing for us. My classmate Kim had been equally excited and concerned for the trapped bird. She was punished in a like manner. Kim cried pitifully, but I did not. Even though the teacher took me behind the blackboard for the punishment, it embarrassed me much more than it hurt. My teacher had no idea, and at that time neither did I, that my hands are malformed. I have no sweat glands or oil glands in my palms. I only knew then that they were tough as leather, more like my daddy's work roughened hands than my mother's smooth ones. I only knew that the teacher could have pounded on them much more and much harder and I would have barely felt it. My feelings were hurt and I was embarrassed, but not enough to cry in front of all my classmates.

    I didn't get another physical punishment until I was at a new school and in the fifth grade for the third time. Thanks to my sister Sandi's urging, I had turned over a new leaf and decided to stop deliberately failing all my subjects. I brought home predictably good grades and made honor role several times that year. I had always been a little prone to laugh and play, a bit of a distraction, but I was a fairly obedient child. The incident with the ruler had been the extent of my physical punishment for all my years of school. And yet, that year I got not one, not a dozen, but twenty-four paddlings, and they were all from one teacher, Mr. Steele.

    Mr. Steele was not very tall, but what he lacked in height he seem to make up in girth. Looking at him now, I'm surprised he seemed so big to me then. But at that time, to see him coming down the hall in the mornings was a frightening sight. As students, we spent most mornings playing in the parking lot. I was one of three girls I knew that usually played touch football with the boys. But on wet or extra cold mornings, we were disallowed that pastime. We were herded off the buses and into the hallway to wait for classes. We would sit near the door that led to our homerooms, our backs against the wall, and socialize or work on the homework that we should have done the night before. We were not allowed to enter our classrooms for a while, so the hall would soon be teaming with as much activity and the noise as fourth through seventh graders thought they could get by with. Mr. Steele was sometimes hall monitor and we dreaded those days. But, monitor or no, every morning he would come walking down the hall, swinging his paddle in his hand. Though almost every teacher would paddle you, he was the only one I knew that carried his paddle nearly everywhere he went, prepared, like a big boy scout, to blister your bottom. He moved fairly quickly for a man of his size, but that required some fierce swinging of his arms, and therefore some fierce swinging of the paddle in his hand. He seemed to rush down the hall with the broad paddle narrowly missing some wiggly fourth grader's head. If he passed someone that was producing more noise or movement than he deemed allowable, he would pull them into the middle of the hall and set their backside to burning with several licks of that fierce paddle while spectators wincingly looked on. As far as I can remember, these hallway offenders were always boys. Children far enough away to get by with it often snickered and made fun. No matter how far away I was, I did not snicker. I did not find Mr. Steele's paddle to be one bit funny, and I felt utterly sorry for anyone on the receiving end of it.

    Mr. Steele taught my grade, Health and Spelling. In his classroom, we played a little game that only he enjoyed. He would ask the students questions by turns, and anyone that gave a wrong answer would get one lick with the paddle. Correct answers bought you only a delay, another chance to lose later. It seemed to be more of a pretend paddling for most of the girls when they missed a question. But me, he paddled like he did the boys, fiercely. Looking back, I wonder if that was because I was a tomboy. Surely, he saw me playing football with the boys outside in the mornings. At any rate, he set me on fire every time. And "a lick", like the other kids would get, would rarely do for me. Often if he called me up to be paddled for missing a question he would strike me three or more times before allowing me to sit back down on my now fiery bottom. After Mr. Steele got hold of you with that paddle, you had to sit slowly and easily.

    I found it odd that he would give me more than one lick when one lick seemed to suffice for everyone else. Odd that he wore me out when most of the girls got easy licks. Odder than either of those, though, were the times when he'd say to me, "Come on up here and take your whooping." And I would protest, ask what I had done, proclaim my innocence, only to be told, "Girls like you need whooped now and then whether they did anything wrong or not. You're that kind of girl!"

    I did not want to be "that kind of girl," but I accepted his skewed reasoning. I took the three licks when it was supposed to, by his own rules, be one. I took the real paddlings when most girls got easy ones. I took the paddlings that came out of thin air for no reason. I did not cry, but instead I smiled or laughed. He pretended it was funny, and I tried to pretend I was in on the joke... But I wasn't. I simply would not give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I thought that was what he wanted, and besides, crying would humiliate me even more in front of the other students. So, the built up tension came out of me in laughter.

    I had decided years ago that telling your parents can only make a bad situation worse, and that, in this world you were largely on your own. Most likely, I would be in a different grade with different teachers next year, and I was determined to tough it out until that time. Toughing it out had worked brilliantly in the past. I felt certain it would work now.

    Near the end of the year, one of my classmates brought her camera to school. She was a sweet friend. She asked for a photo of Mr. Steele pretending to give me a paddling because it had been such a common sight for the fifth grade. I objected because I knew him well enough to believe that he would actually paddle me if he got that close to me with a paddle in his hand. But I really loved this girl; she was one of the sweetest girls I'd ever met, and I marveled at the fact that she treated me so kindly, when clearly, she was "above me". She was very pretty, and wore nice clothes, she hung out with the "popular" and the "rich" kids. And I was so grateful for her kindness, that when she asked me twice I was petrified but felt I had to do it. I took the photo with my arms drawn up against my chest, trying to brace myself for the blows that might come. I don't remember if he managed to get a lick in that day or not, but now, I'm glad I took the chance and took the photo. I love the picture. If you're going to endure something painful and life-altering, it's nice to have a souvenir.

    That summer I saw a woman named Norma get shot and killed in the supermarket in front of my home, and I was relieved to get back to school where the threats held paddles and not guns. When I came back for the sixth grade, I wondered if everyone would know that I was there when the cashier was shot. Our town was a small one, and people were not often murdered in the supermarket. I was concerned that it would be the topic on most of the students lips, and prayed so desperately that they would not know. I didn't want to hear about it, or tell the story, not even once. Finally, my life was "normal" and if they knew what I had seen it would explode into something else. I didn't want to be "the girl that saw the murder." I loved blending in with that grade full of kids that didn't treat me like something or someone different. To my great relief, Norma's death was barely mentioned, and no one seemed to know that a young girl was in the store at the time. Instead, everyone was bustling with the news that Mr. Steele had died of a heart attack over the summer! After the shock wore off, some of my classmates started the joke that I had killed him. All those paddlings had worn him out and given him a heart attack. It was all my fault that he was dead, they told me. I smiled but I didn't really find it all that funny. Unlike my classmates, I had looked death right in the eye and I did not consider it a humorous subject. It seemed to me that no one deserved to be that still forever, that gone from this world. I wasn't glad he was dead, hadn't hated him, and certainly had not killed him. The only thing funny to me was the fact that he would never again single some girl out for being, "That kind of girl." The idea wasn't funny enough to make me laugh, but it did put a smile on my face once and a while.

    I only received a few paddlings that year, though one of them did send me sprawling down some steps. When the teacher saw that I had righted myself without plowing nose-first into the floor, I imagined, for just a moment, that she might she be ashamed of herself, might call it quits for the day. She did not. She ordered me back up to her, faced me in the other direction, and administered the rest of my punishment.

    I was middle aged before I realized that, just maybe, Mr. Steele had enjoyed not only sadistic pleasure from striking me, but possibly sexual pleasure. I was two years older than the other girls in my grade. I was a short girl, but my body had developed more than most. A friend said he paddled the kids he liked. At that time, I'd rather have been disliked by him, if that were the case. I still don't know why he did it. I only know he did, and that I survived it, and learned from it.

    By the time my sons were in school, corporal punishment was not allowed in most states. We did live briefly in a state that allowed it though, and I met with the boys' teachers and the principal. I explained that if anyone ever deemed it appropriate that one of my sons have a paddling they absolutely must call me in. If the child needed a paddling I would do it myself. I further informed them that if my sons were ever paddled without my consent and my presence I would not only sue the county school board I would physically punish whoever had hit my sons. I wasn't very popular at that school, but I didn't really mind then or now, and no one ever took a board to either of my boys.

    Mr. Steel, and a few other teachers, beat me. They taught me that I did not support corporal punishment. They taught me that children often need protection from adults, and that sometimes you have to defend kids in advance because maybe they'll be convinced that not telling you is a good idea. They helped me make sure that both of my sons made it through school without one of the dozens of paddlings I got. In the end, I think I owe them. I would not want to be without those lessons.
    

WHY I FAILED THE FIFTH GRADE TWICE

Artwork: The Garden of Eden
By Skitch, second year of fifth grade

THEN:

A Secret to Myself or Why I failed the Fifth Grade Twice

 

     When I was in the fourth grade, I missed sixty-four days of school. Almost unbelievable, I've been told. But that year, I'd fought a tough war with meningitis, suffered one bladder infection after another, and several bouts of strep throat, ear infections, and tonsillitis. My mother worried over every little sneeze and kept me home as often as she could without the truant officer knocking on our door. My fourth grade teacher didn't like me very much, so I found myself encouraging my mother to order me to stay home. When you consider all that, maybe sixty-four days at home seems a little more believable. 

     Near the end of the school year, my parents told me I would be held back. At my blank stare, they explained that I would have to take fourth grade over again. This news saddened and frightened me. I didn't want my best friends Jutannia and Angie to go on to the fifth grade without me, but my parents told me that it was too late to change anything. The school year was nearly over and I'd missed far too many days to be sent on to the fifth grade.

     Still, on the last day of school, my report card read that I was promoted to the fifth grade. I carried that card home as proud as punch. My parents, instead of being pleased and proud, like I expected, were angry. I was too young to understand that they were probably embarrassed about making a firm prediction and seeing it fall flat, or to realize that maybe they were worried about me being passed on to another grade without the proper preparations. All I saw was that they were angry that I was going on to a higher grade. They were angry about something that had pleased me very much.

     My father took the report card and went to school to talk to the teachers. When he returned he looked defeated. It broke my heart to see him so. He told my mother that the teachers said I'd managed to keep my grades acceptable even though I missed so much school, and that I was simply too bright to hold back.

     I was an adult before I understood how my subconscious computed all this information. Now I can remember realizing that my parents seemed to react about the same way to a bad grade as they did a good one, and thinking about how their own school history ended early. My mother did not make it past the sixth grade and my father didn't make it out of the fifth. Maybe they wanted me to be like them? The back of my mind decided it did not like it when my dad looked defeated; The teachers would not win next time.

     All this, though, rested so far back in my brain, that if I had tried with all my might to explain to you why I stopped caring about good grades and pleasing my teachers, I would have failed miserably. I didn't understand the progression of my own thoughts well enough to spell them out to myself, let alone clue anyone else in. At that point in life, I was a secret - even to myself.

     My first year in the fifth grade I did not miss as many days, but I turned in almost no homework, and I did no studying. I let my mind wander during class and kept my head bent over a sketch, or a book of my own choosing most of the day. The kids in my class had been hard to get along with for years, ever since the teacher that had trained them to call me "poor" and "filthy". So, I practiced not caring what the teachers wanted, as I had worked on not caring what my fellow students said about me. It was actually a bit of a relief to divorce myself from the cares of the fifth grade.  My report card at the end of the year listed me for the fifth grade again. I showed it to my parents and I can remember a look on both their faces that I thought said, "I knew it." Now, the teachers could not argue with my dad and tell him I needed to be passed on to another grade. Now my dad would not have to bother talking to them or coming home with a defeated look. Still, it did not escape my notice that they did not seem particularly pleased either.

     My second year of fifth grade, I tried just as hard to be uncooperative, really I did. The back of my mind had decided that I would not go any further than the fifth grade because I was not one bit better than my daddy. I avoided as much responsibility as I could force myself to, but I nearly passed despite my efforts. I had a wonderful teacher, Mr. Dotson. I had a lot of great teachers in school, but he was head and shoulders above the rest, in my estimation. He went above and beyond when it came to teaching. He wanted us to learn and he knew that in order to really learn something you have to be interested in it, so he worked at making everything he taught just as engaging as he could make it. That is how Mr. Dotson went above. He also brought in subjects that were not on the school's curriculum or reflected on the report card. He taught us vocabulary, current events, photography, art, and more. We even researched some of the Believe it or Not!s that were in the paper, and we researched Robert Ripley, the man that had started the collection of odd facts. That is how Mr. Dotson went beyond. He introduced us to subjects I didn't even know you could study in school, fun things, things of great interest to an inquisitive young mind. He taught the required subjects and taught them well, but he still found the time to teach us so much more. We worked on crafts and made most of our own costume accessories for a Halloween school play. (I was a witch!) We kept an art folder, a written journal of our day to day lives, and a creative writing journal that we filled with stories and poems. He also taught us to research, take notes, and make story outlines; and those went in the creative writing journal as well. Every morning, Mr. D. passed the newspaper around for a bunch of ten year olds to read. (I was eleven.) He did not yell at me if I got sucked into an article and missed something that was being said, or if I chuckled aloud over Snoopy's latest exploits, which in those days were brand new and wholly unexpected. Every morning the class discussed an article or two from the newspaper. Almost every morning we discussed the "Believe it or Not!" entry. Some of us believed it; some of us did not. Mr. D. treated us like human beings with opinions and ideas that actually counted. He treated us like part of the world, like the future. He did not treat us like irrelevant snot-nosed brats that needed to sit down, shut up, and do as we were told. Oh, I loved and love him to this day! He taught me so many important things and the most important of all was how to treat a child like a human being.

     Mr. Dotson had two young ladies that the other kids considered his "pets", Jennifer and Rose. Jennifer was a feisty little short haired girl. She had lots of opinions and energy and probably more money than I could have imagined. Rose was a deep-woods hillbilly girl. She had a kind spirit, a speech impediment, hand me down clothes, and free lunch. I loved Mr. D for his diversity, for not singling out the boys as pets just because they were boys, and for not treating me as though I were less important than Jennifer and Rose. In my opinion we were all his pets. I loved Mr. Dotson and craved his attention and admiration, and yet I was never the least bit jealous of these girls. I was not convinced they were his favorites. I felt he was just as good to each of us as he was to the others. Some of us demanded more attention. Some of us needed more attention. But I did not feel for one moment that he liked those girls more than he liked me. When he looked at me, I knew he cared and wanted me not only to learn but to be safe and happy. When he looked at me, I knew he saw me, the real me, the human being under the scraggly blond hair, second hand clothes, and skinny frame. And yet, if Jennifer was particularly hyper that day, he might look at her a bit more than he looked at me. If Rose was struggling in English, he might look at her more than he did the rest of us. I figured when he looked at them it was the same. I believed that he cared about them, that he wanted them to learn and to be safe and happy. I did too, so I never minded his showing attention to the other kids in class.

     He praised my sketches often and handed my art folder over to a few people that came in the room asking to see the work from some of his best artists. They chose a half finished sketch of "The Garden of Eden" from my folder and put it on the cover of a book the school was printing. It pleased me to be chosen and annoyed me that they did not have the time for me to finish the picture. Half my fruit was colored in and half was not. I thought it looked ridiculous, but they loved it, so on the book it went.      I remember once, sitting at a table working on crafts, and someone asked, "How do you spell spaghetti?" 

     A moment of silence followed while I waited for someone else to tell him. When the silence dragged on I said, "S-P-A-G-H-E-T-T-I." 

     "Wait a minute!" He raised his voice, "You went too fast!"

     So, I spelled it again, slower this time. And when the silence seemed to continue to drag out, I looked up to find Mr. Dotson staring at me. "How do you know how to spell that?" He asked me, "I can barely spell that one myself."

     "I don't know." I shrugged. "It's on the jars and packages." And I looked back at the craft I had in my hand, but I never forgot the surprised look on his face. Who know spelling spaghetti could be such a big deal?

     Mr. D. spent much of that year encouraging me, telling me to, "Always do your best" in everything I undertook. It pained me to disappoint him by not bringing in homework, but I loved my parents very much. My grades were never good, due mostly to the lack of homework. He signed my yearbook, "You are as bright a student that was in my classroom this year. You have all kinds of ability, believe me. I hope that in the future you will discover that learning can be fun and you can enjoy school." I watched his long fingers as he wrote the words. I wanted to tell him that I loved to learn, but that school was very hard to enjoy when some teachers were as different from him as salt was from sugar. I wanted to tell him that I didn't want to disappoint my parents again, and that I was sure I was not one bit better than my mother or my dad. But I only said, "Thank you," and I sat back down with my yearbook.

     I survived disappointing him at school and then had to deal with my sister's disappointment at home. This was even worse! Sandi shook her head, and her eyes looked moist. She said she knew I could do better. For weeks, she looked very sad whenever she talked to me. My family would be moving from our wonderful sprawling farm to a small town house soon. Sandi tried to put a nice spin on it. She told me that maybe what I needed was a new start in a new school. She gave me pep talk after pep talk about fresh starts and giving school my best efforts. Like Mr. D. she often told me, "Always do your best!"

     My parents did not have anything to say, good or bad, about my being held back yet again, and I remember thinking if it meant so much to my sister, and my folks were going to be just as happy with As as Fs or vice versa, then why not pass in school? I decided I would stop avoiding my homework and pay more attention, that I would stop causing that sadness in my sister's eyes.

     We moved and the kids in the new school had never been trained to call me "filthy"or "poor". They liked me! They had a wonderful accepting attitude that I'd never experienced before. The "rich kids" were often more kind to the "poor kids" than I had ever imagined they could be. Sandi was delighted when the good grades started trickling home again, and my mom signed the report cards as agreeably as she had the ones with a line of Fs going down the side. I made second honor roll several times that year and passed on to the sixth grade with ease. Passing from the sixth to the seventh was nearly as easy, though I hadn't studied the same books three years in a row that time. I remember that it was a relief to have a new Literature book once I entered sixth grade! I was beyond tired of that fifth grade Lit book.

     Looking back, I realize my parents probably did not want for me what I thought they did. More importantly, looking back, I realize it was my own life that I was tripping up, not Mom's, or Dad's, or Sandi's, not Mr. D.s. My life! And if I had my life to live over, I would do a few things differently. I would certainly learn with a capital L, and I would not be reluctant to show it! I would put even more effort into my classes than I had when I decided to stop failing, because even then I had dragged my intellectual feet, content with "good grades" when I could have made great ones. I would show Sandi and Mr. D. that I knew exactly what they were talking about when they said, "Always do your best!"