K is for Kept (Day # 11 of A to Z Blogging Challenge)

In second grade, I was an excellent speller. I liked spelling. I qualified for the city-wide (or was it county-wide?) second grade spelling bee, which was to be held in a large mall on my birthday.

I was given a thick sheaf of stapled pages of words to study. I did not study them that hard . . . and my mom didn't push me to study harder. I remember going over random words from the booklet the night before, and feeling pretty good. That last section of the booklet had really long words. . . as long as "Mississippi", but not as easy to spell.

When we got there, and were waiting in line to check in and get my name tag, I heard other kids in line bragging about the long words they could spell. Mississippi was nothing! I started feeling a little scared, but then I remembered that they would start with shorter words.

When it was my turn at the microphone, I got very nervous and shy (hey, I had to speak into a microphone!), so the MC put her arm around me, as shown in the picture above. Then she encouraged me to spell the word.

The word was "kept". I had absolutely no clue how to spell it! I remember spelling it with a c . . . "C-E-P-T-D" - something like this. I was confused and anxious. I felt like I was in a fog. I learned how to spell the word that day, though, and never forgot.

Afterward, we went to the Paramount Music Palace for pizza for my birthday. They had an organ that rose out of the floor, plus all sorts of other things available at the flick of a button . . . bubble blower, movie screen (for the silent movies the showed sometimes), train whistle, fake bird/music, etc. It was a magical place. The organist played selections from the "Sound of Music" for my birthday once. (People could submit requests.) The song I remember most from the Music Palace was "Chattanooga Choo-Choo".