The Eagle of Shame

I didn’t win too many awards as a child. A couple of little league basketball participation trophies, a little ribbon for winning the spelling bee in third grade, and that was about it. Except for, of course, the eagle.

When I was young my grandfather met the oldest living Eagle Scout in the world. Apparently, he was in the business of molding and painting ceramic eagles by hand. My grandfather thought these would make great gifts for some of his grandsons when they earned their eagle scouts, so he had the gentleman make one for my brother, with his name engraved on the bottom and everything.

I never really liked Boy Scouts, and wasn’t very good at it. All the tying knots, making bird feeders, and watching mammals seemed silly and pointless to me. So I would just sneak to the trading post and buy Laffy Taffys and pop rocks with Eric Armstrong while everyone else worked on their merit badges at camp.

Consequently, I never earned my Eagle Scout. Neither did my brother. The age of 18 came and went for each of us, and the ceramic eagle just sat on a shelf in Gramps’s den. Some years later, he sent it to us, with Joel’s name still engraved on the bottom, and a new message scrawled on the under it: “And Clark didn’t too.”

We displayed it proudly in our bedroom. A symbol of our failure. A constant reminder of humility. If we ever got too complacent in our successes or too confident in our abilities, we would look up at its piercing eyes and hear its silent, tormenting cry: “KAW! KAW! YOU FAILED!”