Leif Erikkson was an Icelandic explorer best known (probably only known) for having "discovered" North America long before Christopher Columbus. I guess word of what Erikkson had found didn't get around much or people didn't grasp what it was he'd located so when that Columbus guy happened upon what we now know as a separate continent, he was able to "discover" America all over again.
Which of them really deserves the credit? Here's my absolutely correct answer: I don't care. Doesn't matter to me in the slightest. This article is not about that at all. It's about Pauline Binder. That's not her real name, of course.
When I was back in Elementary School though, I and a number of my classmates would fervently argue that it was Columbus. Why? Because it made our fellow student Pauline Binder mad and we hated Pauline Binder.
There was a reason the other kids hated Pauline Binder and a slightly different reason I hated Pauline Binder. I'll tell you my reason later. They hated her because, as some of them put it, "She thinks she's smarter than we are."
And why would she think that? Well, maybe because she was. Pauline was a real smart young lady. She was even smarter than I was and I was pretty smart.
Way back in this post, I told the story of how I was repeatedly skipped ahead in grades when I was at Westwood Elementary School. What I didn't mention then is that a girl named Pauline Binder was also skipped a couple of times. Some semesters, we were in sync. The counselor who came to the school every few months to test me and check on how I was doing would on the same visits also test her and check on how she was doing.
Pauline and I talked about all this once in a while and as it turned out, we were both unhappy with the skipping. What was the big hurry to get us out of school? Why was it more important than us having friends?
I didn't like being younger than almost anyone else in my class and I didn't like the mixed-blessing label of Class Brain and I didn't like that I had skipped the classes wherein kids were taught certain social skills and how to play certain playground games. I eventually figured most of them out but it took a while and during that while, I was a bit of a freak or outcast among my peers. Pauline had the same problem only worse.
As I said, every few months, this nice counselor lady would come to the school, call each of us out of class for a few hours — Pauline in the morning, me in the afternoon — and make sure we were (a) keeping up academically with the older students and (b) getting along socially and were happily fitting in with others. The answer to the first question for both of us was always yes.
The answer to the second question was always no but that didn't seem to change anything. In our separate sessions, Pauline and I would each tell the counselor lady that we weren't fitting in and that we were somewhere between "unhappy" and "miserable" in that regard. No matter what we said — and Pauline would usually start crying and telling how everyone else hated her — the counselor lady would say, "Well, that will stop soon. I'll see you again in two months."
Pauline was unhappier in her position than I was for three reasons. One was that I had a good memory for all the jokes and silly things I read in comic books or heard on TV. I could sometimes interject one at the right moment and make my classmates laugh. Pauline had no sense of humor whatsoever. In fact, she seemed to be pretty dour most of the time.
Another was that my passion for cartoons had led me to learn how to approximately draw a lot of my favorite characters. Other kids would come up to me on the playground and say, "Jimmy said you can draw Popeye. Can you really draw Popeye?" So I'd pull out a pen and draw Popeye on their book cover — not at all that well but impressive given my age and lack of art training — and they'd think I had a bit of a super-power. I drew a lot of Popeyes and Huckleberry Hounds and Charlie Browns.
And thirdly, if someone picked on me, I could usually do a semi-decent job of not showing the hurt and once I'd done that, gracefully fleeing the situation. Pauline would cry and scream and argue and just put on an incredible tantrum show. Some kids thought it was a lot of fun to get Pauline Binder upset.
I'm not big on that kind of "amusement." I don't like ugly confrontations. I don't like practical jokes except occasionally (and only occasionally) when they're the kind the "victim" will genuinely laugh about. As I got older, I began to get zero pleasure from the pain of others, even people I might think deserve some.
Around the time that many of my classmates thought the greatest sport was not handball but taunting Pauline Binder, some of the boys had another favorite activity — making prank phone calls. They'd gather at the home of one of the guys whose parents were out and take turns. One classmate had a reel-to-reel tape recorder he'd take everywhere and he also had a little suction-cup device that enabled the (illegal, I guess) taping of phone calls. So they'd take turns making the calls, then play them back so everyone else could hear how upset and angry and hysterical the person on the other end of the line got.
There was no wit in these calls, no attempt at anything clever. The idea was just to say hurtful and/or dirty things from behind the shield of anonymity and to get someone pissed-off. I never thought this was fun or funny but in a misguided attempt to "be one of the guys," if I was invited to the party, I went. And since the guys I wanted to have accept me were laughing, I laughed — or at least I pretended to. Like I said, I never thought pissing people off was funny. Not even when I was ten.
Mostly, they called strangers at random, making careful note of their numbers. If they lucked onto someone who got really, really hysterical, they'd want to call that person back and do it to them again. The targets were usually more upset the second, third, fourth and especially the fifth time.
At some point, one of the guys might say, "Hey, Mark hasn't made a call yet. Give Mark the phone!" And suddenly, I'd be on the spot to call some old lady and ask her how many wee-wees she'd sucked lately. I really didn't want to do this. I was just there to try and fit in with other boys my age.
Fortunately, I figured out a way out. When they shoved the phone to me and gave me a number to call, I'd only pretend to dial that number. Actually, I'd dial the number of the phone from which I was calling. Naturally, I got a busy signal and I'd hold the receiver out so the other guys could hear it.
I'd say, "She either took the phone off the hook or she's calling the police on us" and everyone in the room with me believed it. No one was afraid of the cops busting in the door to cart us off to the slammer. We all felt unidentifiable and untouchable over the phone. But everyone would just shrug and maybe joke about how Evanier had such bad luck…every time he dialed, the line was busy. And then someone else would call someone else. My friends never caught on to my little trick.
Told you I was smart.
But not smart enough than it didn't take me a while to make the connection between the victims of these calls and Pauline Binder. The adults who were targeted because they got the most upset weren't bright enough to just hang up the phone when they realized it was one of those damn kids again. There was no fun calling someone who didn't let the guys hear their upset and anger.
Similarly, Pauline — as smart as she was — wasn't smart enough to not cry and get furious and put on a show that only invited more picking-upon-her.
This was during the period when you could get Pauline real upset if you told her Christopher Columbus and not Leif Erikkson had discovered America. So other students kept doing it just to start the show and enliven a recess period. She'd shriek and sob and yell, "No, no, no! How many times do I have to tell you?" Then when she was all worked-up, they'd tell her she was ugly and they all hated her and she'd run off in tears to the principal's office or somewhere just to get away from her tormentors.
There are a number of things I did when I was younger of which I'm now ashamed. Heck, there are things I did last Tuesday of which I'm now ashamed. But looking back at my days at Westwood Elementary, I may be most ashamed that I joined-in on the picking on Pauline Binder. As I said, the other kids did it because Pauline was so snotty about being smarter than them. That's what started it but it was perpetuated by how upset she got and how much fun it was to make her cry.
I did it — and here comes that reason that I promised earlier — because I wanted the other kids to think I was more like them and less like her. After all, I'd been skipped a couple of grades like she had. I could be viewed as "Class Brain" like she was. There but for the grace of Popeye went I…so I joined in the tormenting —
— until one day I made that connection. I couldn't pick on the anonymous victims of the gang's "funny" phone-calling and I realized I couldn't pick on Pauline Binder. One day at recess when others sent her crying and running off to a secluded part of the playground, I followed her. "Leave me alone," she screamed at me through very real tears.
"I came to say I'm sorry," I said. "Sorry for what they said and sorry for the other day when I joined in."
She looked at me in a way that made me sure I'd done the right thing. Then she said — and this is a quote, I remember this conversation vividly — "Nobody ever said they were sorry to me. Ever."
And she stopped crying.
We sat on a bench and talked for a while. She asked, "Why do they always pick on me?" and I told her, "It's because the way you get angry is funny to them." Pauline was a very bright young lady but somehow, that had not occurred to her.
I explained to her about the stupid phone calls and because she was so bright, she understood instantly what I was telling her and what she had to learn from it. She said, "I had it backwards. I kept thinking that if they saw how much they were hurting me, they'd stop." But she didn't think she could stop getting upset when they kept saying Christopher Columbus, not Leif Erikson, had discovered America. That was really a big thing to her.
I said, "Why should you care if they're wrong? Some of these kids get F's on their arithmetic tests. Are you upset because Fred Stein thinks eight times seven is 53?"
That was part of what I did to solve Pauline's problem and make myself feel like I was undoing some pain I'd inflicted. The other part started later that day at lunch period. I went around to some of the kids who'd been insulting her and said, "Hey, let's stop picking on Pauline Binder. She's not hurting anybody." Every single student I said that to said some version of "Sure. I'm just doing it because everyone else does."
So maybe my reason for hating her wasn't that much different from their reason for hating her.
Not everyone stopped right away but some did…and the ones who tried to get her upset found that she didn't put on quite as good a show as she once had. So most of the problem went away and Pauline thanked me over and over for years to come. I felt a lot better too, especially after I stopped joining in when Donny said, "Hey, my folks will be away all Saturday. You wanna come over and we'll make some phone calls?"
I can look back at my life and list all sorts of stupid things I've said and done. If I were to write a post here about each one, we'd have to get another Internet because I'd fill this one to capacity. Fortunately, I can also point to moments when I realized some of those things were stupid or destructive (and that includes self-destructive) and had the smarts to stop and when possible, undo whatever could be undone. This has been the story of just one…the time I corrected my behavior and helped Pauline Binder.
The next time I write one of these, I'll tell the story of how Pauline's problem got worse in high school…and how I couldn't help her there. Nobody could.