My Dad is a really bad speller. I first discovered this when I was eight years old. My elementary school days were marked by neon slap bracelets, pogs, and weekly spelling tests. We would be given a list of words on Monday and we had until Friday to learn how to spell them. Unlike my dad, I was a really good speller. I consistently scored 100 percents on my weekly tests. At that point in my grade school career I had an A+ streak going. That was, of course, until I asked my dad to help me study.
The word was “separate”. He told me it was spelled s-e-p-e-r-a-t-e. I got it wrong on my test. I was devastated.
I was reminded of my dad’s bad spelling several years later when my Uncle Dennis suddenly passed away. It was a tragic event for my family and the wake and funeral were particularly emotional. My mom and aunts thought that it would be nice to leave blank guest books around the funeral home during the wake so that family and friends could write down some of their fondest memories of Dennis. My aunt who delivered the eulogy at the funeral the next day could share some of those memories.
After a draining evening we decided to gather the guest books and read through the entries. Page after page was filled with touching stories of my uncle’s warmth and generosity. Then, we got to my dad’s entry.
For starters, he misspelled Dennis’s name repeatedly. The person he was referring to in this book was someone by the name of Denise. My dad recounted happy memories of going down to the shorehouse with Denise. Except my dad also has really messy handwriting, so shorehouse looked something more like $horehouse. That’s right, in that guest book meant to pay homage to wonderful, caring Uncle Dennis my dad wrote about visiting some dollar whorehouse with a broad named Denise.
Again, I was reminded of my dad’s bad spelling tonight when I passed by the dry erase board on the refrigerator, where we write down stuff we need at the grocery store. Lets take a closer look, shall we?
For starters, my dad appears to have dyslexia. I really just don’t know how else to explain “begals”. He also misspelled spaghetti. I admit, it’s one of the trickier words to spell and my background in Italian has made me particularly sensitive to correct spelling of pasta variations . I could let that one slide. My favorite, though, is the way he attempted to write yogurt. I had to google this one to make sure that he didn’t just accidentally correctly spell some weird British version of the word. Nope, not even close. It looks like someone needs to revisit 2nd grade spelling class.
*The next day he added another item to the grocery list: Soy Sause
