The Spelling Bee Will Determine Your Intellectual Rank
At least, in my case, it did.
Haley and I recently stayed up to watch the National Spelling Bee on television. This year’s competition was epic, with dramatic twists and turns and a climax worthy of a World Cup final: the victor, Faizan Zaki, a seventh grader from Allen, Texas, spelling out the winning word—éclaircissement1—without a single pause or question.
My wife and I are sports people.
In that, we find common ground. But in a prior life, Haley was a numbers nerd, enjoying all those useless pursuits I wish she would not pollute our children’s minds with, such as equations.
I was on the other side of the fence: a lover of words and maps and capital cities.
The year before Mickey and Jeremy arrived to serve as my closest friends and rivals, I measured myself against two prodigies: Ann Cannella and Dong-Hyun Sim. And it was precisely they who joined me as the Last Children Standing in the Assumption Catholic School Intermediate Spelling Bee in the spring of 1998.
What we had achieved already was incredible. The intermediate competition featured third, fourth, and fifth graders, all competing in front of our parents, the parish priests, and Sister Gloria Doria2 for the glory of being featured in the now-defunct local newspaper, the Bayonne Community News. As if predestined, Ann, Dong-Hyun, and I were seated at each other’s shoulders under the bright lights, watching in astonishment as the rounds passed and the older kids competing were banished from the stage for tripping up on words like scissor and umbrella.
“Do you think one of us could actually win?” I whispered to my classmates, my pale blue dress shirt soaked through with sweat. I was unmoored, but they were unmoved, staring stoically forward, waiting for their names to be called.
Dong nailed chimney, Ann got produce within seconds, and I guessed my way through on kitchen, taking too long to reflect, as I still do now, though as relieved as ever to not hear the gong that served as our signal of rejection.
I’m not sure if we’d have known it then, but 1998 was the last year of Assumption School’s existence. (The adjacent church, which served mostly Italian and Hispanic immigrants, was closed by the Archdiocese of Newark in 2015.) The Spelling Bee may have been its last notable event ever. Soon enough, all the historic markers of Bayonne’s Catholic culture would either disappear or merge, leaving buildings to decay or be bought up and turned into condos by out-of-town developers3.
Ann, Dong-Hyun, and I would be forced to change schools in September. The same month we readied ourselves to participate in the Bee, we also prepared to interview at the city’s gifted-and-talented public school, which Ann’s mom told mine and Dong-Hyun’s about at a Chinese auction. “They will accept only 40 fourth graders,” she said. “Ohhhh, that’s not very many,” my mom responded. And I could sense the eyes of all three mothers bearing down on me, for they knew I was the weak link in the chain.
Perhaps that was the motivation behind our historic performance: attaining the final accolade required to boost our prospects and inch ahead of the other in our race to be bestowed with the title of Intellectually Gifted.
Explore. (Check.)
Museum. (No problem.)
Patient. (Wait, could I actually win this?)
The sounding of the gong of doom from the holy sister was the dagger (d-a-g-g-e-r) in my heart.
“Whisper,” I said, breathing like I’d just run a mile uphill. Whisper. W-i-s-p-e-r.
“That is wrong, Brian,” Sister Gloria said, assigning three Hail Marys as I exited the stage cursing that awful silent “h” to hell—though it was I who was forced into purgatory.
Ann made it through on camera, Dong on destiny. I watched them tussle like titans, sitting crisscross applesauce with the losers on the floor below the stage, until Ann got caught on treasure. And I’ll be honest, no language of origin or sentence usage would’ve helped me either: whether absent or present, the “h” is the downfall of every aspiring speller, and you cannot convince me otherwise.
With his parents—grocery-store owning Koreans who’d worn suits for the occasion and recorded on a giant VHS camera from the back row—watching, my rival earned his title fair and square.
Turbulence. T-U-R-B-U-L-E-N-C-E. Turbulence.
The successful spelling left Dong with only one more word to spell to stand alone atop Mt. Everest. The decider was mural, a softball, frankly, that he spelled in as many seconds as it has letters.
Afterward, he was rewarded with a basket of chocolates or flowers or saintly figurines. Our teacher, Ms. Pellicio, urged that Ann, Dong-Hyun, and I stand together for the photo. Since its printing, nearly 30 years ago, my mom has kept it tacked on a corkboard in her kitchen.
It remains one of the few great achievements of my childhood, and I didn’t even win.
By some miracle, I was accepted into PS 14, regardless4. Though I would not compete in a Spelling Bee again, I did find two other oddballs to participate in Quiz Bowls and Academic Challenge teams with. To this day, you’ll find us sharing obscure things on WhatsApp nearly every day: Jeremy’s recent, a BBC Sport video on the football pitches of the Lofoten archipelago in Norway; Mickey’s, a list of the 100 Best Food Regions in the World that, inexplicably, has Italy and Greece owning 11 of the Top 20 positions, and only a single representative from India (Maharashtra).5
That fall, Dong-Hyun would join me at the nerd school, though our relationship would fizzle as his parents occupied his extracurricular time with piano, chess, and math tutors. Mine left me alone to skateboard and wear ballchain necklaces. (Perhaps it is the reason for our divergent paths today.)
Implausibly, Ann was not accepted at PS 14. I haven’t spoken a word to her since we all stood in our Catholic school uniforms, teary-eyed, watching from the parking lot as our first school closed forever.
Ann made good on her potential, nonetheless. She attended Mt. Carmel, a parking lot away from PS 14, where she was valedictorian, and then eventually a Catholic high school, where she was, again, valedictorian. (Both of those schools are now closed; Mt. Carmel was transformed into condos, and Holy Family Academy sits abandoned.) She now goes by Carolyn. According to the internet, she is employed as the deputy chief policy advisor to the Governor of New Jersey, with a master’s degree from Harvard.
After we graduated from PS 14, Dong-Hyun went to private school at Staten Island Academy and then on to accomplish his parents’ Korean American Dream, attending an Ivy League university, becoming a medical doctor, and marrying a Korean girl with whom he now has a Korean daughter. As far as I know, his parents still live in the same apartment facing Hudson County Park where I had my first sleepovers and later told Mickey that his parents kept Ziploc bags of dog meat—my petty retribution for being bested in the Bee.
While my former friends were educated amid America’s intellectual uppercrust, I attended the 10th-ranked of 11 public universities in New Jersey. I earned degrees in Latin America and journalism, neither of which are looked upon favorably by immigrant families whom place their hopes, whether consciously or not, on their children’s shoulders.
But I’m not here to pout.
I will do the next big thing: I will teach my daughter and sons to love words. To befriend all the Indian kids at school. And I will sneak my way into friendships with their parents, using my elementary knowledge of Gujarati to scope out their methods of instruction. Just as Jeremy once memorized the phonebook as an act of penitence6, I will memorize the Thesaurus and trick my kids into believing words are fun and not just tools for intellectual domination.
Enzo is already showing promise. He refuses contractions, saying “No thank you, Mama, I do not presently want a peanut-butter sandwich,” instead of, “I’m not hungry, Mom.”7 Alba scribbles notes using phonetic spelling—her mother had her hooked on the stuff by 4—and is only permitted to read books written by British people who lived a hundred years ago. For breakfast, I make her curry porridge.
They will be my legacy.
Watch your back, Dong-Hyun. I see you out there in Indianapolis, ignoring my Facebook messages, pretending like you aren’t training that 4-year-old to come for mine in Washington. I’ll see you in the crowd there, at the Scripps Bee in 2031, ready to enact my vengeance.
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A noun of French origin meaning the clearing up of something obscure, per Merriam-Webster.
Say what you will about Catholic nuns, but gosh, for as much as I feared her, I am sad to read that Sister Gloria died in 2023, though, per her obituary, she served until the very end.
I am not Catholic, but I am nostalgic. And I love art and stained-glass windows. It saddens me to walk or drive by the abandoned school building every time I’m in Bayonne. Here it is on a retro Bayonne Facebook page. For some reason, a history of the church, published in 1953, could be found in a public library in Fort Wayne.
Eventually, like Assumption, PS 14 was closed—or rather, it was “reimagined”—but not before its students spent a year in the Assumption building after the city knocked down and built a new public school on the site of PS 14. As a freshman in high school, I used the excuse of visiting former teachers to see both of my schools again. I was happy and sad, too. The new PS 14 is named after Nicholas Oresko, a Ukrainian-American combat veteran of World War II and one of Bayonne’s Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. While it is a zoned school now, it maintains a gifted-and-talented program.
As if they needed more fuel to dominate our Bees, winning almost every national event since 2008.
More about this in a future story.
God bless you, Peppa Pig and Beatrix Potter.