Dear Me Letter: Looking at People

Dear Me,

When I was a kid, and even now, I loved looking at people, especially old people because of the character in their faces. I’d look at them and their ways down to their bones just to see what they were like. And as a teenager, I carried a sketchbook around and would sketch them.

Once in a while I’d see one who was being someone they really weren’t, like a person who dressed up to go to a fancy party but you could tell they weren’t a fancy-party person. I knew because I’d done it. Even if I hadn’t, it was easy to see anyway. They’d put on another personality like you put on old clothes, or a mask over their whole being like Halloween. Then when they stepped in their front door at home, you could just seen them relax and step out of whoever they were pretending to be and there they stood as the one they were all the time, themselves. I guess that’s where the expression “I can see right through you” comes from when a person can see what identity another is wearing for a time.

It was this I was thinking about when I was asked to give a small talk in front of my 11th grade English class at Central High. Other than being so shy I wished I could turn inside out and pull a draw string at the top of my head to hide, the thing I remember about that talk was telling them I liked “common people.” Miss Piercy, our teacher, a tall statey pleasant-looking big-boned fiftiesh woman with a kind of Gibson girl hairdo, who filled me with the impression she’d eaten and digested every literature book there was, lifted her noble head slightly and asked me what I meant by “common people.” I think I told her “just regular people,” but if she’d ask me now, I’d say “just down-to-earth folks.”

 It’s a bit off the subject, but, as I mentioned before about loving to look at people, as a student you have a chance to study the teacher for the whole class period. And they can’t leave either They have to stay there and teach. Now that I look back, I probably annoyed the heck out of some of them by watching them so intently. But I had a good time watching Miss Piercy. When She’d teach us grammar and we’d have to diagram sentences, I had less chance or interest in watching because I had to make sure I learned it for a test.

But then there was my favorite part of the class, literature. One day she was reading from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Bells”. Poe coined the word tintinnabulation (of the bells) to communicate the bells' sound. My memory is etched with the way Miss Piercy said that word - distinctly with the corners of her mouth moist and turning up with every syllable, especially at the “t’s.” She was as entertaining with the word onomatopoeia, pronounced ah-no-mah-to-peeah, meaning vocal imitation of a sound, like “oink” “meow” “tick-tock”, etc. - stating it slowly with round sounds.

If this hasn’t put you to sleep yet, you may be able to see why this stuck with me over the years. The point of all this is just itself. I hope I don’t have to apologize for this being as dry as a corncob pipe.