Labels

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

~ Philip Pullman

- - - - -

I can't remember if I shared this or not, but when I was in sixth grade, our teacher, Mrs. "Sit down, Shut Up, Keep Still" Richardson would let my best friends Joel Hanson and Dave Fischer and me go to do special activities outside of class. I don't remember everything we worked on, but one assignment she gave us was to make clocks for the time zones in the U.S. we made clocks and stenciled the names of locations at the bottom. 

Anyway, the way the poster was set up, there was only room for two lines of stenciled text at the bottom. I had made a clock for the Mountain Time Zone and for some reason we agreed that Salt Lake City would be the city we would use. I ended up labeling the clock as follows:

SALT LA-

KE CITY 

Dave and Joel laughed and made fun of me for that. I had to agree it looked ridiculous. 

(pause)

Mrs. Richardson didn't laugh. She just said, "No. Fix that." 

You learn lots of things in school.