Fine, I’ll Give The President My Second Place Spelling Bee Trophy

Everyone is running around, panicked, and yelling, “What can we do to appease him?”

 

And the answer is obvious: I’ll give him my seventh grade spelling bee trophy.

 

It is the only trophy I’ve ever won, and it was highly coveted among other tweens who prepared diligently for the competition. We skipped lunch to study. We skipped all the social events that we weren’t invited to anyway.

 

And he was skipped over for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to him.

 

When I find the right storage box it’s in, I’ll bestow it to him decorously, in a fancy ceremony to be held in my attic. I’ll highlight the fraught academic jousts, and the political savvy needed to win this important award. I’ll tell him tales of seventh grade cut throater-y and deception that will briefly earn his respect; until he talks to someone else about something else.

 

We will eat Funyuns. We’ll drink Mountain Dew from classy vintage McDonald’s Happy Meal cups. Those are also deep in a storage box, but I’ll search for them just to honor him.

 

Wait until he hears that first place was stolen from me. Others got much easier words, and better uses of the word in a sentence than I did.  This trophy may be silver, but it should have been gold. Once it is rightfully his, he can have it dipped in Home Depot paint to bring it up to his standards.

 

Although I have no idea what it is made of, I’m nearly certain there is no lead in it. The bee figure is barely identifiable as an insect, but it stands proudly upon its faux marble base. Its small hands hold an unread book. It has a distant look on its smug face. The years have faded its original metallic hue to the color of a bruise. It has an oversize mortar board atop its head, resembling a toupee. Its bulbous bottom has a very tiny stinger.

 

It will look tremendous next to other high profile trophies he’s been freely given, like that FIFA one he took.

 

All this trophy’s bragging rights become his once I place it in his hands. Even if that is not how it is supposed to work, according to that Nobel Committee. Luckily, no one from the 1983 spelling bee committee is still alive to contest its transferability. You are welcome, Greenland.