(Forgive me for being self-indulgent – this has nothing to do with clay!)
Valentines Day in the 4th grade – we had all decorated these big envelopes with our names and Valentiney stuff and hung them on the back of our chairs. At recess, we went out to play and our teacher, a substitute for the day, took all the Valentines we had brought in and put them into each of our envelopes. Now this was back in the day, when each card was individually addressed, so she had to match them to our envelopes. We came back in, had our party and maybe did some school work. (yeah, probably not)
Later that night, my actual teacher, Mrs. Shelver, called my Mom. It seems that the
substitute had told her it all went well, except that she had all these leftover Valentines for Cindy and poor little Andy got no Valentines. Mrs. Shelver knew me well enough to know that I wrote Cindy so that the “C” and the “i” almost touched.
Yeah, when we came back from recess everyone opened their Valentines except me – my envelope was empty and I had come home and not said a word about it. My Mom sat me down and said, “We are going to fix this. For now on, spell your name the Gaelic way “syndee” and it legally became my name. And I don’t capitalize it so that it can NEVER be mistaken for Andy again.