The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: OFFICE

For 2019 I'm running a year-long series on my blog in which I share my responses to the writing assignment prompts found in THE BUTTERLY HOURS by Patty Dann.

I welcome you to join me, if you like! I've divided the prompts by month, and the plan is to respond to 3 (or so) a week. For some of these I may write poems, for others prose. The important thing is to mine my memory. Who knows where this exploration will lead?

For links to the prompts I've written on so far this year, please click on The Butterfly Hours tab above.

This month's prompts are notebook, October, office, pajamas, paper, party, pencil, perfume, phone book, photograph, pictures.

OFFICE

I was generally a good student, so it came as a surprise to me and everyone else when I found myself in the principal's office – getting a paddling! Yep. It happened when I was in 9^th Grade, the first year I moved to Birmingham. This was a tough, tough year for me, but I was not a trouble maker! So how did I end up in the principal's office? There was an incident on riding home on the bus in which the vinyl covering on the back of one of the seats had a tear in it. With a little help from some eager hands, the tear got larger, and some of the stuffing started to spill out. Mine was not one of the hands doing this damage, but because I was at the scene of the crime, I got paddled for it.

I should also note that I was paddled (3 licks, if I recall correctly) before my parents were ever contacted. I was alone in my (male) principal's office and asked to bend over and put my hands on his desk while he swung the wooden paddle at my rear. I remember feeling embarrassed, vulnerable, angry, misunderstood...