Four
Ask anyone who knows me (and honestly, my regular readers count here) and you’ll know I’m not a shrinking violet. Not a shrinking anything, really. See the tag line? That’s pretty well my approach to life.
This became really obvious for the first time when I was four. I was a student in a nice little preschool, where my mother happened to be the director. We had one of those schoolrooms with an adjoining small coed bathroom. We’d go in individually to potty, but for handwashing (say, before snack, or after a messy craft) we’d all line up in a line and wash one after the other. The wisdom of putting twenty sets of gluey fingers behind twenty other children’s hair/clothing is something I’ll leave you to ponder.
Anyway, I was waiting patiently in line for the sink, when in cuts Jason* and he starts washing his hands, as though I wasn’t even there! So I decked him. One good slug to the head, and he never messed with me again. One can only imagine how my sweet mother, who’s tough as nails but totally non-violent (her idea of a conflict-filled movie is Little Women) reacted. I’ll have to ask her sometime.
*Names have been changed to protect the guilty. Although I’m not sure I even remember his name. No matter, half of the extraordinarily naughty boys of my generation were/are named Jason.
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