"I Always Knew You Were A Quitter"

Bud and I are both longtime Cribbage players. He learned to play down at the store in Brooks when still a child. The old duffers taught him well. His skill coupled with his luck have won him a lot of games. I did not learn to play until my late teens. Family members and others who know us know we play a two out of three tourney every day. Granddaughter, Katrina, gave us a very nice new board for xmas similar to the one above.
I will often cede the game to Bud when he is way ahead of me. He is always telling me I shouldn't give up, that even when I am way behind it is still possible to win. He says, "You could catch up with one hand." That seldom happens. A perfect cribbage hand is 29 points. Bud had a 28 point hand a couple weeks ago. He also says, "Looks like you're in the catbird seat" and "But you've got first count" often.

In our first game today Bud was only three points from going out. I was back around 11 holes. I was going to give him the game. I had first count but he is so good at pegging I knew he would peg out and win before I had a chance to count my hand. He said, "Ah, don't you want to play it?" For a change I went ahead and played the hand instead of quitting. Amazingly he only pegged two. I pegged a few and had 10 points in my hand, so I won the game! He didn't even get to say, "See, I told you." I said, "Wow, you were right!" before he had the chance.

Bud's gentle words of encouragement not to quit were 180 degrees different than those I heard from a teacher fifty years ago. John Lenz taught Latin, English and Speech at Corning High School for many years. He was also the drama and speech contest coach. I never had him for a teacher but for some reason I decided to learn a dramatic speech for contest my junior year.

I decided on the Lady Macbeth monologue 'Out damn spot' and began memorizing it. Because I wasn't in a speech class, I had to either go in early or stay after school for help from Mr. Lenz. After several sessions during which I felt he wasn't interested in giving me direction and because staying after school meant extra trips to town for my Mom or Dad, I decided to give up on the idea of going to speech contest.

The only words I remember Lenz saying when I went in to tell him were, "I always knew you were a quitter." If he even tried to talk me into staying on, I don't remember it. I just remember being very upset. (I'm sure I went to the girl's bathroom and cried.)

There have been many, many instances over my lifetime when I haven't quit; when I've kept on keeping on; doing what needed to be done. Yet those words of being a quitter are the ones that have stayed with me.

I suspect Lenz 's statement was his way of trying to make me mad and determined to keep working on my speech. Instead they scarred me for life and gave me a lasting dislike of him. How different might it have been if he had been as encouraging as Bud?