This is my entry into Denis Faye's The Great Easy Fiend Humiliation Contest. It should be noted the contest isn't limited to High School. But this is the story it brought to mind for me.

You'd think anybody's Most Humiliating High School Moment would have something to do with looks or sex or--at the very least--PE. Not mine. My worst high school moment was an academic faux pas. Even decades later I still cringe at the memory.

Of course I had my share of minor humiliations along the bumpy road of early adolescence. The unfortunate "pixie" haircut. The perfectly executed high dive which lowered the top of my bathing suit. The rope climbing incident. The unrequited crush who told his friends I wasn't cool enough. 

All pale in comparison to the mortifying Poetry Debacle.

To really understand, you need some background. I come from a long line of academic and professional achievers. All the way from my grandparents' generation to the present, we're lousy with PhD's, MD's, JD's, MBA's and MA's.

From pre-school through prep school we know we're going on to college and grad school. From earliest childhood we're lovingly introduced to the wonder and power of imagination, words, intellect.

Our bedtime stories were Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling. And oh, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women -- my all time favorite. Our mother would read one chapter a night. Which we'd discuss the next day and try to predict what would happen.

Little Women introduced me to the true beauty of a compelling story. My connection to the March family was so strong that the chapter-a-night rule became agony. So I taught myself to read. And finished the book on my own. I was four years old.

Then I found a volume of poetry. Huge. Almost too heavy to lift. Fell in love with Frost, the Brownings, Emily Dickenson. By age six I was writing stories and poems of my own. And could recite from Dickinson's Time and Eternity, Because I could not stop for Death.

I'm not unique in our family. We're intelligent, engaged, competitive, curious and accomplished. I don't mean that as hubris or elitism. It's simply the natural outgrowth of a confluence of culture, dedication and genes. And a tradition that stressed educational excellence. Intellectual fulfillment. Personal best.

So it's no wonder I still shiver with embarrassment over my untenable gaffe in Miss Pabst's 11th grade Advanced Literature class at The Baldwin School, best of the best. To this day I don't know where my head was, why I spoke before I thought, who spiked my morning cocoa with Idiot Juice.

We were studying poetry. Specifically Randall Jarrell, new to all of us. My first clue should have come when Miss Pabst warned, "This is not Elizabeth Browning, Young Ladies. Nor does it resemble those trashy romantic novels you all love so well. This is about Real Life."

Then she read aloud his taut, intense poem, Death of the Ball Turret Gunner as we followed in our books. The title alone should have been my second clue. The words themselves should have clinched it.

"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
Randall Jarrell, Death of the Ball Turret Gunner