Mr. Ruffles

The second semester of your senior year in high school is pretty laid back if you’ve gotten into college and are confident that you are going to get straight “A”s. At my high school some of the classes were adapted to allow for the most relaxing semester possible. AP Senior Literature had at least a month dedicated to poetry. We read poems and wrote about the corresponding poet and their work. I chose Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Because I was ready for my senior year to be over, I told my little brother that he should help me out by writing the paper. Clearly this wasn’t going to work because I can’t not do work that’s assigned to me and I need an A on everything. He agreed to write me a paper on Alfred Lord Tennyson if I agreed to turn it in to my teacher. I agreed, for some unknown reason, and he got to work.

I wrote the real version of my paper that I would then have to preset in front of my class, but committed to Brent that I would include his version on the back of my assignment – and I did just that. I turned the following piece of work in and passed a copy of it out to every student in my class.

Cristy (Brent) Watson

4-26-04

Alfred Lord Tenison

Alfred Lord Tenison is dead. He wasn’t always dead, though. In fact he was alive back sometime. He lived in Cambodia and lived off of garbage while living in a shack next to Safeway. In 1675 he began writing poems. His poems were about all kinds of things. Things like wars. One day he ate an apple. Next he ate a strawberry and it was the sweetest strawberry he had ever eaten. Its sumptuous juices ran down his chin and stained his shirt. He washed his shirt and then he wrote the charge of the light brigade.

Tenison liked to play fetch with his dog, Mr. Ruffles. His dog was a big dog. It ruffed. Once his dog got out and his neighbor killed it with poison. He was inspired to write more poems. After eating more garbage he moved to Europe in 1754. He liked it here. He had a cat here but it ran away because he beat it too much. When he was cooking dinner he burned his house down. This inspired him to write more poems.

After a short career as a boat driver, he ran his boat onto the beach and decided to right some more poems. He always liked to look at clouds. They reminded him of strawberries. He didn’t like stars, though. He liked poems a lot and then he died.

I was glad to see that Brent did an appropriate amount of research – not enough to even know how to correctly spell the poet’s name. And I also enjoy the part where we learn that Brent is in fact writing this while in Europe somewhere. I didn’t know he had ever been there.

The reactions from my class were even worse than I could have predicted. Even after me explaining why it was that I was turning it in – I had convinced Brent to write it and had to turn it in as part of the agreement, no one seemed to understand. Maybe my family’s humor doesn’t sync up with anyone else’s, but I think this is hilarious. So the strange looks from my classmates and the confused noises accompanied by “I don’t get it”/“Is this really about him?”/“Why did you write this?”/“You didn’t write this?” was totally worth it to be able to share this piece of art with the world (or at least my class).

And even though last time I got a confused reaction, I’m sharing this masterpiece again. Someone is bound to understand the brilliance behind this. Well done Brent!