It took me awhile to care about spelling

I was never a good student. I was easily distracted, especially in elementary and high school, and figured sentence construction, adverbs, adjectives and spelling were for the students who sat in the front of the class, not those of us who sat in the back to hide out.

I was especially bad at spelling. So bad, in fact, that I once misspelled my own name on the nametag for parents day at school - my last name. I knew how to spell Larry.

But, like with many things in life, I grew up. I now eat vegetables (except eggplant, which looks like a garden slug when it's sliced up). I no longer pick the pimentos out of green olives. I don't burp in crowded elevators. And I learned to be nice to my little sister.

My evolution to adulthood has also included an obsession with spelling. Probably a good idea, since I became a writer. Yes, I became one of those people who keeps a dictionary on the desk - a real one, nothing online. It's one of those massive ones, so large that it takes two hands to hold.

Maybe it's because I was so bad for so long that I take pride in getting the words right. Everyone needs some small victories during the day. For me, it seems some days the most satisfying wins are when I look up the word and find I spelled it correctly. Like I said, small wins are important, too.

Anyway, the thing about obsessed people is that we need to keep it to ourselves. But then, every so often, something smacks us in the head and we realize that not everyone shares our affection for spelling. Like last week, when I was walking the hall of a U.S. House office building and spotted a sign on a representative's door that read: "The office is closed due to retreet."

At first, I thought maybe the office was closed due to a tweet, which seems to be the word of the day in Congress.

But as I pulled my head out of my dictionary and actually read the sign rather than jumping to a false conclusion, I realized the author of the sign had meant to spell "closed due to retreat." While tweets are common in the nation's capital, so too are staff retreats, where people head out of the office to a meeting room, conference center or rustic cabin to plan strategies for next year's tweets.

I thought of taking a pen and correcting the sign to spell "retreat," but I figured that would offend the person who was so thoughtful as to tape the sign to the office door. They didn't need me playing teacher and marking up their homework assignment.

Still, I was embarrassed to see the misspelling in the halls of Congress. Embarrassed because it made me remember how I was never embarrassed at my own bad spelling years ago. I learned. I just wish I could tell my teachers.