Here's something we rarely talk about--what we know, how we learned it, and what made us the peculiar and pretty-smart people we are.

It happens all the time: a friend says something brilliant or comes up with the right way to do something I've been doing wrong, and I wonder, How did you know that and I didn't?

When just-knowing-somebody moves into friendship, the outer bubble gets punctured, usually by one of us saying something smart or vulnerable or silly, and the other one thinking: Wow!  I like her!  How did she get so smart?  Did she have a really amazing 6th grade teacher or what?

In school, I learned to diagram sentences, make an apron and lemon meringue pie, type on a blind typewriter, and do basic algebra. (The most useful was keyboarding, the least useful algebra.)

Extracurricularly, I learned to fall in love a few times (what else was there?)  to play hymns on the piano, and to be friendly enough that the senior class at Central voted me "Friendliest."  I never learned to twirl well enough to be a majorette, didn't make the top ten in the only beauty contest the seniors made us 9th graders enter for their fund raiser, and my only solo was a bomb in front of the whole Cochran Elementary School auditorium--"First there was a little ole ant, thought he'd climb a rubber tree plant...."

We don't often talk about what we learned and how we learned it, what dogs (and sometimes people) bit us or bruised us.  We don't often talk about what scared the bejesus out of us (rats for me) and how we learned to avoid anything that looked remotely like them. We rarely share--except with our closest friends who promise not to tell--the most embarrassing life lessons.

But--as we say down South--I'm fixin' to do just that, starting with year one at the University of Georgia.  I was seventeen, and the sprawling tree-shaded campus and all those ancient brick buildings made me feel smart (or at least potentially smart), like a hopeful piece of new in a world of antiquity and knowledge.

When faraway boyfriend in Texas got word that I was spotted talking to another boy, the proverbial excrement hit the proverbial fan.  To avoid the spray from the fan, I transferred to a small junior college in our hometown--big big mistake.  I "learned" to obey, to avoid conflict, to please a man.

Fortunately, I've un-learned a lot of that and am learning new ways of being in the world every day.

I'm glad for all the really good teachers I encountered along the way, especially the ones who taught me to love and read literature--starting with my mama and continuing through graduate school and beyond.  I'm also sometimes a little bit glad for the bad teachers, the biters, the mean people--who taught me what to avoid if I wanted to live a happy life.