Day 3 After the Bee:

I am curled up in a ball, clutching on to the 3rd Unabridged Dictionary like a lifeline as I surrounded by a cumulative circle of spelling paraphernalia ranging from water bottles to Snoopy to my beloved Banagrams. No, not really, but mentally I may as well be. I call myself a retired speller, slightly jokingly, slightly with a twinge of sadness. I’ve joined the ranks of whom I thought of as “really old people” as a 4th grader starting spelling. I can feel my spelling hairs graying and my bee’s knee’s creaking with each step. But in all seriousness, I’ve started to come to terms with the idea that I was done with spelling. But I’m not completed detached yet. I’ve found some things that start to occupy my time, like that neverending pile of summer homework.

I turn on my computer, my hands smoothly going straight to open Merriam Webster out of force of habit. The simple action requires no thought, it has become an automatic motion as soon as I power on a device. The mere act of closing the window feels like a light sting, reminding me that I don’t need the CD-ROM to be permanently open anymore. (Also totally false. I am guilty of still using it if I want to define a word)

But despite all of this effervescing nostalgia that’s annoyingly ever-present, I am starting to get used to days where I may not even look at spelling materials. However, I still set apart time to just skim over random languages or mess around with search functions. At least I’ve passed the time of obsessively reading through news articles about spelling bees or twitter threads, which can sometimes be surprisingly incendiary.

After the glitz and glamor of the 2017 Scripps National Spelling bee, an entire week of spelling, meeting old friends and new friends, staying up until when I normally woke up on the last day, after-after-after parties, my spelling career was complete. Years of studying and having fun exploring new words, languages, roots, you name it, I’ve probably entered it in the “Find Definition” function on the Merriam Webster CD-ROM, seemed like they were things to be left in the past. I’d always known, in my head that spelling competitions were not available on a large scale to people older than eighth grade, but never had that bit of knowledge seemed so daunting to me.  I thought that that chapter was done and that I was supposedly ready to move on to the next.

There’s an emotional, almost visceral aspect of spelling that not many people seem to be talking about. We aren’t robots mechanically spitting out a series of letters, and then if there is a mistake in the ‘programming’ we don’t just go home and try to chomp down some more words hoping that next time we’ll get the words right. The rush, your heart pounding as you utter out a sequence of letters in front of an audience, hoping, praying that it was the right one. Or for a brief moment, you feel like you are soaring above the clouds after you spell a word correctly that you’ve never even heard before. However, not everything is so positive all the time. After all, bees would not work if everyone always spelled correctly. There also is a plummeting feeling when one hears “I’m sorry but you have spelled the word incorrectly” or the sound of the bell. To this day, I still cringe a bit when I hear a bell ring in the same tone.