By the time I’d left the eighth grade, I’d attended thirteen schools. Dealing with all those changes led to the development of uncanny protean skills, including the art of answering questions before they were asked. For instance, my mother, Agnes, an ace at avoiding small talk, taught me:

“When you meet new people say, ‘My name is Regan. It’s from Shakespeare and it means queen in Gaelic’, so you won’t have to answer all their questions.”

This tactic thwarted the name questions on the first day of any new school, especially since my grade school classmates didn’t know what the heck I was talking about. 

Word Daily, coughed up “protean” the other day, a word seen once in every 16,000 pages you might read. I never use it, though I completely click with the namesake origin, Proteus. He was a Greek sea god who knew all things, past, present, and future. Recognized as a shepherd of sea creatures, he slept among the seals and otters, which, save for the smell, appeals to the phantasms leftover from my childhood mermaid dreams.

Proteus escaped those seeking his knowledge by changing his shape to avoid answering questions. In modern parlance, not a shape-shifter, but rather someone flexible and adaptable, is protean.

Proteus sleeps with the seals. Artist: N.C. Wyeth

In the lower grades, adapting to mean-girl culture, I inevitably and reluctantly had to announce, “I repeated first grade because I was sick; then I skipped second grade.” This answered the question of why I couldn’t add or subtract. If I had remained in that first-grade school, my parenthetical nickname would have been “The Repeat” all the way to the eighth grade. The Repeats were few but well-known. We bonded with knowing glances passing silently in the hallways. 

We were Catholics. My sisters and I attended parish schools, wore parish uniforms. There was never a back-to-school ritual in our house because we never went back to a school we had been to before. The beginning of each new school year was a fresh start. 

In Terre Haute we rode our bikes; in St. Louis the school bus. In downtown Indianapolis, we caught a public bus crammed with garlic-breathed commuters. In the Chicago suburbs, a school bus, my mother’s station wagon, bicycles, and walking, all brought us each year to a new building, a new neighborhood. 

I never learned how to predict the future like Proteus (though a spiritualist on LSD once told me I had the gift of prophecy). Predicting what the next parish would be was never in the cards—it was always a mystery. My ears didn’t reach high enough to hear my parents deliberating the matter. But I could easily predict we’d be in a different school for the next grade. For better or worse, we all exhibited protean traits: flexible and adaptable. 

Early on, knowing stuff came to be my raison d’être. I became and remain an insufferable know-it-all. Geographic stability has diminished the necessity for protean mental agility of late. 

But protean knowledge? It continues to inoculate me from ever being called any version of “The Repeat”. 

Regan Burke's avatar
Regan Burke's book, "In That Number" was a finalist for Chicago Writers Association non-fiction Book of the Year. Her brief memoirs and personal essays appear in the Christian Science Monitor, Sun Magazine, Chicago History Museum "In This Together" Project, City Creatures, Safe 'n Sound, Easter Seals Blog. Chaleur, Rise Up Review, Bird Garden's Murder of Writers and Writing Out Loud. She lives on Potawatomi land in downtown Chicago with Elsa, the West Highland Terrier. Her main activity is reducing the weight of the here and now.

18 thoughts on “Back to school”

  2. Cool that Word Daily gave you a writer’s prompt and you did so much with it. Is that the new NYT game everyone is talking about? All of those childhood moves would have trashed my self-esteem. I have never and will never be called protean.

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      1. I’m currently in a writers’ group hosted by the library where I work. I’m interested in taking some in-person classes, but there aren’t many options where I live.

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  3. Flexible and adaptable were strong survival traits as you took various conveyances to myriad schools growing up.

    The N.C. Wyeth painting of Proteus is wonderful, both abstract and narrative.

    “Regan” from King Lear?

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  5. This morning you remind me of a song of my past. “My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light. He courted a mermaid one fine night. And from this union there came three. A porpoise, and a porgy, and the other was me.”
    “Awesome” is used so freely these days in reaction to things that don’t even come close to being awesome. I think your life and writings are awesome for sure. I am delighted every time I see a new one. Thank you..

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      1. I just started Love by Toni Morrison. Before the story begins there’s a preliminary lament by the persona of an older black woman who recognizes how much has been lost by the extreme opennesss of sex. No more do the ladies of song exude their sexuality by sly looks and slinky gowns. Instead they wear sequined bathing suits and straddle chairs. It’s the straddling that really gets her. What’s the point? Not much hidden these days, so titillation is pretty much gone. Potter Stewart’s notion “I know it when I see it” is, I think pretty old fashioned now. But then, so am I.

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  6. A brilliant reflection of a challenging childhood. Thank you for sharing. Sorry I do not do social media but I wanted you to know how your words affected me.

    Peace, Donna

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  7. <

    div dir=”ltr”>You are journaling and it is fun to read.  Makes me think d going back to school, which I always loved.  Both the first day and last day were wonderful.  I don’t think I feel like th

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  9. How does wordsmith sound?  A story well told. 

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    div>Thanks for that…….

    Gay Roberts Cell  312/636-6677gayroberts30@gmail.comSent from my iPhone 

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