The ABC Game: A Tale of Bad Teachers and Family Road Trips

Think back to a time you felt really embarrassed, humiliated, or ashamed.

It might have been a long time ago, in childhood, or just recently. Regardless of when it was, I bet you can feel it right now as if it were happening again.

Shame is visceral.

But I believe vulnerability begets vulnerability, and feeling inspired by having just watched Brené Brown’s Netflix special The Call to Courage, I’d like to share a story.

Broken Home

I entered middle school (grades 5 through 8 where I grew up) as the “new kid.” On the first day of 5th grade we were asked to write an essay about a trip we took during summer vacation.

In retrospect there were a lot of things wrong with that assignment, the most egregious being the presumption that all students had families who could afford to go away on summer break. Still, mine could and always did, so it was an easy assignment for me.

I grew up with divorced parents in an era when I was almost certainly the only kid in a given room whose parents weren’t together. In spite of that my parents worked hard to give me a relatively normal childhood, and I received the incidental benefit of getting twice the holidays, twice the presents, and twice the vacations.

One house was just me and my dad. The other was a full family: me, my mom, my stepfather Kevin, my little brother Michael (~5 years younger) and super little sister Emma (~10 years younger).

My dad preferred flights, nice hotels, and Disney. My mom and Kevin, in a rather different financial situation for most of my childhood, preferred cross-country road trips in the minivan, hiking, and sleeping in tents.

Indoors vs outdoors. Luxury vs nature.

Summer Vacation

Every other year my mom’s house family vacation took a trip to Maine. We stayed for two weeks in a cottage on the water, got fresh lobster right out of the ocean, and returned to nature.

I really loved the Maine trips.

But I didn’t love the long car ride packed with two adults, three kids, and enough clothes, hiking gear, and camping supplies for two weeks. It was stuffy and often tense.

This was ages before smartphones were even conceived, and although we owned a Gameboy, Kevin was a stickler about limiting our time spent staring at a small screen.

“You’re going to rot your brain. Turn it off.”

To pass the drudgery of driving my brother and I played a game my mom invented: We were to yell out when we saw an ‘A’ on a road sign, billboard, or license plate. Then a ‘B’, a ‘C’, and try to work our way through the entire alphabet in order.

Michael and I sat way in the back bench of the minivan on every road trip of my entire childhood, playing the ABC game for hours and hours on end.

It brings a smile to my face even now, two decades later, just thinking about it.

Public Humiliation

I turned in my assignment and the following day Mrs. Arrigo returned our summer vacation essays, but stopped midway through.

“Class, most of your did very well on these. But I’d like to give you an example of what a bad essay looks like. Here is what one student wrote.”

And then she read my essay out loud, to the class, in its entirety.

“My brother Michael and I sat in the backseat and played the ABC game…”

I can still hear the relentless giggling laughter and feel my face turning bright red with embarrassment. Although she hadn’t announced whose paper it was, my complexion gave me away. Soon the room wasn’t just raucous, but directing their ridicule right at me.

When she finished reading I wanted to crawl into a hole for the rest of my life.

“You see class, the assignment was to write about your vacation, not the trip. Pay attention to the instructions.”

A+ teacher-ing.

The Journey

Stories of that particular teacher humiliating students were widespread, but that’s not why I’m telling this particular tale.

For years I was devastated, tracing my miserable, friendless, terrifyingly shy middle school career to that one defining moment the very first week. But these days I’m angry about it for a different reason:

It was the teacher who misunderstood the assignment, not me.

She asked us to write about our summer vacation and summarily dismissed everything I wrote because it was about the car ride, not our time at the cottage in Maine. But to me, the car ride was a huge part of the vacation.

Crammed and anxious though it was, the ride became a bonding experience and a ritual of sorts. We sang songs, told stories, and yes, played the ABC game. The long, often multi-day hauls in the car to Maine, the Dakotas, Florida, and Montana were a testament to our strength and love as a family, and a pressure-cooker for my relationship with my brother and sister, who I only saw for half of my childhood, on account of my split homes.

Destinations may make better photo-ops, but journeys make better stories.

We have one chance. Let’s write a great story.