Volume 4, Entry 26: Jack Covey’s Castle

The lingering lessons of medieval models

I was in Kloss Park last week, the setting for a litany of childhood memories. Nearly every elementary school soccer practice took place there, as did countless birthday parties, barbecues, baseball games, and Cub Scout pack meetings. Being right next to Foulks Ranch made it a community hub in a way few places could be in a rapidly expanding city.

At the center of Kloss Park sits a massive gazebo. Elevated above the rest of the lower area, that gazebo housed all of the major events. My favorite: the time my dad announced to our soccer team we had clinched the championship. He had me bring my boombox to play “We Are the Champions” and showed what was, at the time, rare emotion for him.

My return last week was specifically to the gazebo: a local book club had asked me to speak about Sweet Appeal at their year-end picnic. Because this was my first appearance ever as an author, that wonderful event only added to my personal Kloss Park lore. Still, as I pulled up to the park and regarded the gazebo once again, my first thought was neither about Sweet Appeal nor those special memories.

Like always, I thought about flood water.

In January of 1995, a few weeks into my second trimester of third grade, Elk Grove was hit by a torrential rain storm. Overnight, the precipitation overwhelmed the sewer system, flooding the neighborhood streets. Despite the miserable weather and standing water, my mom attempted to drive me and some friends to school, but her car stalled on Laguna Oaks Drive, and we returned home. My parents got several snow days per year as Minnesota kids, but this marked my only school day ever canceled for the weather.

Eight hours later, the sewers by Pedersen Park had cleared, so my mom drove us around to check on the damage. It seemed like most houses had been unharmed, their elevation above the streets serving its function. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Kloss Park was not so lucky, though. With the lower section carved out below the school and fire station, the whole place had flooded up to the street level. The park was filled with so much water that residents were paddling kayaks and canoes around it. At the very center, like a concrete island, sat the gazebo. It alone had escaped the deluge, its interior undisturbed.

We stopped the car to take photos, and that let me regard the structure more closely. The gazebo sat like a stronghold above everything, untouched by the storm. It held a regal quality to it but also a defiant impregnability. The standing water all around it evoked a massive moat, protecting and fortifying it further against intrusion.

To my eight-year-old eyes, it reminded me of a castle.

*****

Evoking a medieval edifice to describe the heart of a flooded park might seem weird, except for one fact: in the fall of 1994, my third-grade class had studied castles.

The intense standardization that marked my early teaching career didn’t arrive until the year 2000, so the 1994-1995 school year still granted teachers more freedom with the curriculum. My teacher that year, Miss Viglione, methodically taught us all of the essentials—multiplication and division algorithms, World History, paragraph writing, the foundations of cursive—but she did so while weaving through big themed units that spoke to larger ideas. I remember best a friendship unit built around the Frog and Toad stories, but others existed that have escaped my memory. Each one always added a little something extra and character-based rather than purely academic.

Third grade is a tough transitional year, so every bit of magic helps. The school day grows longer, the grading system shifts to the familiar A through F one, and actual homework must be completed each day. In my March piece about the film Christine, I talked about those multiple-choice reading comprehension assignments we did, but there were several others in regular rotation.

Miss Viglione also assigned several extended projects that year. There was a patience-testing weaving activity we completed on miniature shoebox looms, a book report that inspired idolization of Jim Thorpe, and even a sewing project in which I made my own lumpy Velveteen Rabbit with cheap fabric and cloth pens. The biggest of those projects, though, accompanied our exploration of medieval history: we had to construct our own period-accurate castle.

I had built many Lego castles in my lifetime; Lego hadn’t purchased the rights to every intellectual property ever at that point, so sets were themed around broad ideas like knights and deep sea exploration. But our class wasn’t just to build an existing Lego set for this. Nope: we needed to make something original out of what we had around the house.

Let me tell you: I was ambitious about this project. That castle marked the grandest creative vision of my life to that point. Mine would be a sleek gray with four paper towel roll turrets, each topped by conical roofs. I would paint a brick-like pattern on the outside to resemble the large stones comprising one’s construction, and I would use string and popsicle sticks to create a functioning portcullis. I could then paint a royal blue moat around the outside and, as my pièce de résistance, I would place Lego figures from the medieval sets inside to form a tableau of sorts hidden behind my castle’s sturdy walls.

The weekend before the project was due—I wasn’t yet an anti-procrastinator—I assembled my creation. Using leftover gray spray paint my mom had bought for our Cub Scout troop’s wagon, I monopolized the garage for an afternoon and set about gluing, spraying, painting, and populating my castle. Aside from the headache delivered by the fumes, I was happy with the results. Especially once I had my Lego figures placed inside, my pride was immeasurable. I had executed my vision.

Marching into Miss Viglione’s classroom the next day, I expected to wow my peers. We stashed our castles on the side tables during our normal lessons, and I could hardly wait to bring mine out near the end of the day for what I now know as a gallery walk. Wandering the room, I had to swallow down some anxious bile when I realized my castle was no superior product; it was good but far from the best. Too many classmates had gone all out with gigantic set pieces that sparkled with literal glitter and impressive ingenuity.

Suddenly worried not about being the best but possibly being the worst, eight-year-old me took solace in finding a few projects that were clearly inferior. One kid’s castle was maybe two inches in width—and made out of cheap paper! I breathed a sigh of relief. With “castles” like that, I had definitely avoided being the bottom of the barrel.

As the activity wrapped up, Miss Viglione wanted to take photos of us with our respective pieces. I imagine I sat glumly at my desk, enviously looking at all of the superior pieces on smiling children’s desks, stewing that my grand vision had been anything but revelatory. I sulked only for a few minutes, though, because soon, a crowd of students was jostling past me and over to my teacher.

“It’s just remarkable!” I heard her exclaim.

No time for questions—I joined the fray without hesitation. I was tallish at that age, so I could see over my shorter peers, but what I found as we all arrived behind our teacher’s back puzzled me. It made no logical sense.

At the center of the excitement was Jack Covey*, a kid I had only met that year. Jack Covey was a round kid with buzzed hair who always wore the same striped shirts. A nice kid, but not someone I knew well.

“Look at all that intricate detail!” Miss Viglione exclaimed with awe. “This is a perfect castle.”

Jack Covey blushed but made a quick gesture with his fingers.

“It, uh, even the, uh, the portcullis works,” he said, his voice a small squeak under the searing spotlight of our crowd.

“And the portcullis even works! Wonderful. This is just wonderful,” my teacher said in the same matter-of-fact way she taught long division. “Dare I say: this is the most impressive castle in this room.”

Jack Covey stood even taller. He beamed, radiating all the pride I had expected to surge through me. Miss Viglione snapped his photo, and everyone stared on, oohing and ahhing at the model in his hands.

While my peers bathed Jack Covey in adulation, I stood silent and confused. My eyes stared intently at the definitive top project in the room.

Because I had seen Jack Covey’s castle already.

It was the tiny, flimsy paper one.

*****

Jack Covey stood in that spot for what a third grader might perceive as hours but what was surely more like a few minutes.

His cheeks kept their flush as he talked about his creation. As the crowd slowly dissipated, I crept closer, still skeptical of the praise Jack Covey’s castle had received. I can still remember the defining argument bouncing around my brain.

This isn’t FAIR! That’s nothing!

Jack Covey’s castle was tiny! I could have blown it out of his outstretched hands. My castle was a sturdy stronghold! It had Lego figures from the medieval sets too! Jack Covey couldn’t fit more than one figure into his fortress! The tip of my wizard’s cap would reach the top of his tallest turret! His scale was all wrong!

As I moved closer, though, Miss Viglione remained at Jack Covey’s side, still marveling. As I approached, I eyed the paper edifice with suspicion.

“Just look at that detail, Mike. Imagine how carefully Jack Covey’s fingers worked to draw on those tiny windows.”

I leaned forward and squinted. Jack Covey helpfully lifted his creation closer to my face.

“And the portcullis really does work!” he said with the same joy I might use to describe a Jason Giambi rookie card. “See?” I watched his stubby fingers pinch two thin strips of paper and pull his colorless door inward.

“A working portcullis at that scale,” Miss Viglione noted. She shook her head with an appreciation she usually reserved for stories I had written. “I’ll say it again: this castle is quite impressive.”

I inspected Jack Covey’s castle once again. The walls were held together with Scotch tape. Every marking was made in pencil. You could still see the original outline marked for the portcullis where he mis-cut. The entire thing was barely bigger than a Post-It note. It looked even smaller up close while dwarfed by my classmate’s hands.

“Do you like it?” Jack Covey asked me. A cynic might assume he was fishing for another compliment, but I think my judgmental inspection had put some doubt in his mind.

I looked up at Miss Viglione. I expected some evidence of a prank but instead found her face still enraptured. Her eyes remained locked on that flimsy paper fortress. She was indeed impressed.

Returning my gaze to it, I looked at its corners and saw tightly wound slips of paper. With no paper towel tubes small enough to build round turrets with, Jack Covey had shredded paper and rolled strips into appropriately shaped cylinders. His turrets lacked my little roofs, and they tilted slightly, but they stood tall. There was greater structural integrity there than I’d expected.

Still waiting for me to relay my assessment, Jack Covey shifted his castle once more to one hand and pulled on his tiny portcullis one more time. As he did, I realized that his castle’s front face had slits, allowing the flat paper he used instead of string to slide frictionlessly through and lift the door.

“How did you cut those little slits?” I asked him. “How did you not hit anything else?”

“Oh!” Jack Covey shifted his second hand underneath the castle to lift it up higher for me. “If you look, I folded the front piece first and snipped it.”

I could see some of the residual creases around the edge. The move was as clever as it was effective.

“Wow! That’s cool,” I said. How had I never thought of that? I chastised myself, a dozen paperwork ideas coming to life in my head.

“Yeah! My grandma showed me how. It’s really easy if you want me to show you.”

I looked up once more at Miss Viglione. She gave me an expectant look.

“Well, what do you think? Don’t leave Jack Covey waiting all day.”

Letting my eyes travel from those tightly wound turrets to the brilliant paper slits to that impossibly effective portcullis at the front, I shook my head.

“Your castle is very detailed,” I noted, echoing my teacher’s evaluations. “It’s remarkable how it’s small but also perfect. Great job!”

Jack Covey beamed as widely and proudly as ever.

As I returned to my desk, a lesson took hold in my mind. In only a few short minutes, I learned to look more closely at small things and admire their granular detail rather than judge everything according to my own scale. I had learned to resist judging books by their covers, suddenly aware that even the most humble, minuscule castle can pace the class. And I had learned that there was knowledge to be gleaned from the intricate process of creating even a flimsy paper portcullis.

I have never forgotten even one of those lessons. All of them became staples of my personality that endure to this day. In a way, remembering leaves me in awe of my third-grade teacher.

After all, while we built medieval forts, she constructed formative experiences that would inform the rest of our lives. Armed with perspective and awareness in spades, she drew my eyes to one kid’s little paper model and gave it meaning far beyond the literal instruction she’d planned.

She taught me a valuable lesson that day with Jack Covey’s castle.

*****

Have you ever returned to a movie from when you were a kid and watched it again as an adult? Nothing on the screen actually changes, but later viewings can be totally different experiences.

The animated film Shrek was released when I was a freshman in high school, so it doesn’t quite fit my timeline, but the Dreamworks production remains a perfect example. On its surface, the film offers a cute parable about true love transcending appearances. Told with familiar fairy tales but in silly, kid-friendly ways, Shrek presents an ideal 80 minutes of tame, PG-rated fare.

Well…kinda. Shrek works just fine as children’s entertainment, but there’s a whole separate level¹ to the comedy classic. Truly, the feature wears cheeky irreverence like a badge of honor, giving characters profane-adjacent surnames, averting racy phrases at the last second, and alluding to all manner of sexual innuendo.

Why do parents let their children watch, then? Because all of it goes over younger viewers’ heads. With no context for the adult jokes sprinkled throughout, they laugh at the sight gags and the wordplay, not the extra layer we do. They lack the life experience to even know they’re missing something, let alone something risqué.

This makes sense: as we get older, we gain experiences that inform our view of the world. Watching Shrek at seven is wholly different than watching at seventeen after a decade of movies, television, books, and websites have increased our cultural literacy. The double entendres do not escape the teenagers who blinked through them years prior.

This delayed understanding isn’t limited to media. On the day that Jack Covey’s castle became the talk of the school, I knew very little about him. We were in our first year on a year-round schedule, so our class was together for the first time, but Jack Covey was new to our school entirely. He sported the same well-worn striped shirts every day. He walked home to the peeling paint-coated house across the street from campus.

My limited interactions with Jack Covey drew partially from his limited time in the classroom. Every day, he and a few others were pulled out of class for an hour to go to the learning center. I had asked my mom once about that, and she told me it was meant to help them learn to read better. Nothing big.

In fourth grade, Jack Covey and I sat next to each other for a trimester. We talked about the normal kid things, though I learned quickly that we couldn’t discuss video games or Goosebumps books because he neither played the former nor read the latter. I played soccer and baseball, but he didn’t do any sports beyond the playground. He rarely watched TV and didn’t have any baseball cards to trade. If we talked about our families and friends, he only talked about his grandma. He’d moved in with her before third grade and never mentioned his parents.

In each of my final three classes at Foulks Ranch, Jack Covey was there, but we never grew closer than peers. There was always just this divide. I didn’t think much of it when he moved before middle school. He was just some kid who made a cool castle…out of cheap paper…with his grandma…in a rundown house…

…

…

Yeah. I know. I get it now.

It all makes so, so much sense. I’m disappointed in myself for never putting it all together. I wasn’t calibrated to put details like these together yet. I logged them—that’s why I remember all of these profile pieces for a kid who exited my life a full 25 years ago—but I didn’t add them up to anything. Adolescent and tween me weren’t the socially aware person I am now.

I’m mad at myself, nonetheless. How did I not see that Jack Covey was going through some shit? How did I not recognize that this guy might’ve had fun trying out Donkey Kong? How did I not play tetherball with him during recess or invite him to the movies? He had been so excited to hear me praise that tiny castle of his! How could I have not gone out of my way to share with a kid who so obviously had so much less than I did?

Because I was still a dumb kid then. I didn’t get it. I assumed everyone had what I had. When Jack Covey said, “I don’t read Goosebumps,” I interpreted that as “We don’t share interests” rather than “I’ve never gotten to read one”. I could have loaned him a book! Maybe they would have helped him grow comfortable reading! There are a thousand superior scenarios I could have catalyzed with Jack Covey, and I chose none of them.

When your own world sparkles, though, sometimes its brilliant gleam obscures others’ misfortunes. The idyllic existence I led kept me clueless. My childhood was an elevated gazebo undisturbed by a massive flood. My upbringing was a castle so secure that it shielded me from the chaos beyond its walls.

Those sobering realizations only raise my appreciation for what Miss Viglione did that day in class. Armed with a few sheets of paper, some tape, and a pair of safety scissors, Jack Covey had achieved mastery. Instead of just awarding him an anonymous A amid a tough transitional year of academic struggles at a new school, my third-grade teacher swung the spotlight in his direction so that, for one moment, he could feel what it felt like to be a student like me.

When I first recognized all that Jack Covey’s castle taught me, I felt like I’d finally decoded some secret message. That was a powerful moment of growth for me.

But it was only last week that the final cog, at last, clicked into place. I needed more than 28 years to understand, but the scope of what my teacher did that day finally flooded my memory.

Her lesson was never for me.

It was for Jack Covey.

---

Because I didn’t want to detract from any piece, I’m planning to put out a super-short extra newsletter this week with my mid-year “favorites” across several categories. Exactly one sentence of elaboration will accompany each item. Since I don’t review movies anymore, I figure an additional, mid-week newsletter makes sense as a replacement.

And, in case anyone is wondering, the artwork’s background features my actual photo of a flooded Kloss Park in January 1995.

The replica of Jack Covey’s castle, though? I built that this week.

1. https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/shrek-adult-dirty-jokes