That Hole in Your Soul

When I think about it, I am still a little bit upset about an opportunity I missed in fourth grade.

My teacher, Miss Thomas, was a young woman with blue eyes, a high, shiny forehead, and black hair styled into a flip.  One day, she announced a contest.  Whoever wrote a list of the most homophones could have a prize.  The prize she held up had my eyes doing flips.  It was the first king-sized candy bar I had ever seen in my life.  I could hardly believe they would make candy bars that big.

I looked at that bar, and I knew it was mine.  I could totally do this.  Why, I could think of ten homophones off the top of my head just like that.  I grabbed a blue-lined piece of newsprint and started writing.  There were be and bee, I and eye, through and threw, are and our (to my young mind).  I even knew some triple homophones!  Two, too, and to and there, their, and they're.  It wasn't very often that I felt I could win an offered prize, but I knew I could do this.  That candy bar had my name written all over it, right over Hershey's.

And then I forgot all about it.

Some days later, Miss Thomas announced the winner of the contest and handed Sherry Royal my candy bar.

I had never finished my list.

I knew it was fair, but I was still dismayed.

I still haven't ever made a list of all the homophones I can think of.  But I plan to.  Maybe when I've retired and the kids are grown.  I ought to know a whole lot of them by then.  Whenever I think about homophones, or hear some new ones, I think about this contest, and how I let myself down.

I was talking to a coworker about this today, and he said he had once won a candy bar like that in an art contest.  He said he put it in his locker, and when he went back to his locker, it was not there.

I gasped!  "Who did you tell your locker combination to?" I asked.

He shook his head sadly.  "I don't remember."

Then I proposed that after I make my homophone list (and he added that he could paint another picture), we go out to a store together and BUY ourselves king-sized candy bars.

Because I'm pretty sure that I still have never had one.  And I'm pretty sure that finally completing that assignment and getting that reward I wanted would heal some decades-old part of me.

"You can't ever fix that hole in your soul, though," he said.