True Best Day

In home room that morning I found the folded letter on my desk informing me of my election to the National Honor Society Quite a thing for the 11th grade, I later found. Perhaps even more for a stumbling over-achiever on some redemption road. There had been earlier letter... one sent home in Junior High by a man named Yonkee, who wrote my mother of an academic malaise in my DNA that was most certain to inform my future. I remember her pleading face as she read me his verdict. And so, that 11th grade afternoon I stopped for the mail on my way from the bus, subtly stuffing my honorarium in the stack That second letter is still in my desk somewhere filed away in a folder labeled True Best Day. Mary Jane passed some eighteen months after my delivery, and that vanished world now seems so remotely mine, but her faith is summoned, sometimes, these later days when Yonkees of the world --see right through me--