I was thinking that getting a C on the report was good enough. In class, Miss Noelle had made up a list from the Wright brothers to Amelia Earhart to Charles Lindbergh—one flier for each kid. She gave me Will Rogers and said I reminded her of him because he was an “odd duck.” I looked at his picture and was disappointed because he was not very handsome. He had a wide, goofy-toothy smile and a piece of hay sticking out the corner of his lips. She didn’t tell me he had died in a plane crash either. Reluctantly I began reading about him and before long I found he was so funny that, to anyone who would listen, I kept quoting things he had said. I wasn’t getting much writing done, but reading his quotes was great fun. “Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else,” he had said. That seemed true. At school I saw a kid puke on another kid and I laughed about it all day. But it wouldn’t have been funny if he had puked on me. And Will Rogers also had said, “Live your life so that you wouldn’t mind selling your pet parrot to the town gossip.”
