grit

comic-book-reading kids in the 1960s/were invited to sell a newspaper called GRIT/in one of those sears&roebuck-esque ads/that stood chockablock next to for example the adolescent-aimed Vacutex

i was never a GRIT newsboy/but intrigued enough now to do a little research/and find that in its heyday GRIT had 30,000 kids on 33% commission/keeping a nickel of each 15-cent sale

also it published fiction and trivia/and as far as trivia goes i hereby submit these meta-grit items:

if you grit your teeth gritlessly with freshly brushed teeth they squeak

a lady named duckworth wrote a book championing a combination of perseverance and passion that she labeled “grit” as a success-touchstone for schoolchildren

grit in an oyster gets coated with a nacreous substance called mother of pearl

if you have a drained blister on a footpad/and run four miles on beach sand in san diego/grit will erode the blister epidermis/and then get into the blistersac/and abrade the tender flesh beneath/and with every other footstrike torture/you will be forced to cut your planned five-mile run short

and you will remember that grit for thirty-nine years