The art of non-answering

The Wife and I diverted from our normal Tuesday night television routine to watch the Presidential debate. Boy, was that a big mistake!

The last time I saw people struggling that hard to answer questions they didn’t know the answer to was way back in Ms. Newsome’s English class.

I spent five years at Briarwood High School, home of the mighty Buccaneers — and no, it wasn’t because I flunked a grade. Back then high school was five years instead of the current four, but that’s not really part of this story.

This is about not answering questions, and if those two guys Tuesday night thought they were good at it, they should have spent a year with Ms. Newsome. They would have really seen some creative non-answering.

This article marks the seventh year I’ve had the pleasure of writing a weekly column for this paper – that’s 364 stories – and I owe it all to the year spent in Ms. Newsome’s eighth-grade English class.

She was the type of teacher that didn’t believe in giving a test that had any true or false questions. She said that anyone can guess right half the time. Obviously she never checked my grades in Coach Muscledine’s health class. The only tests he gave were true or false.

Ms. Newsome’s tests never had multiple choice questions either — I like to call them multiple pray questions. What made her class so hard was the fact all of her tests were made up of only essay questions. To make matters worse, each answer had to be at least two pages long, which meant you actually had to know what you were writing about or be really good at not answering the question.

Luckily, by the time I reached her class, I had already had practice in how not to answer questions – the year spent with her helped me refine that skill to an art form.

Growing up, my three brothers and I were always in trouble. When we got caught, we never answered when asked who broke it, who took it, who threw the water balloons at the police cars late one night, or a hundred other questions.

Okay, since the statute of limitations has surely run out by now, I can finally admit that it was me who pelted the police car with water balloons. But in my defense, I actually thought it was Down the Street Bully Brad and his older brother driving around in his VW bug.

We were in the middle of a late night water balloon war when the incident occurred. I had just used the giant slingshot tied to our second story porch to send five water bombs hurtling through the air toward what I thought was a head poking though the sun roof. How was I supposed to know that the blue dome light of a police car was the same size and shape as Bully Brad’s head?

When the police and my dad interrogated us about who had done it and why, I was the one chosen to answer the question. To this date, that was the best non-answer I’ve ever given.

During the year spent in Ms. Newsome’s English class, I learned that if I didn’t know the answer, didn’t even have a clue, I should just keep writing and be creative. She’d be able to pick out something in two pages that would be good enough for the answer.

The creative writing for essay answers was my idea, not Ms. Newsome’s. She kept telling me to study harder. To her credit, if I’d put as much effort into actually studying to answer the questions correctly as I did in being creative with my non-answers, I would have gotten a better grade than a C. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t be a creative writer now.

My brothers and I never considered that not answering a question we were asked was lying. We just thought of it as being extremely creative with our non-answers.

Kinda like those fellows from Tuesday night. I wonder if either one of them had Ms. Newsome for eighth-grade English?