Kid Calamity

(In case you haven't figured it out yet, I've always admired alliteration.)

There was this one time in Sunday school... Poor teacher. 3rd grade all-boy class? Yikes! Us, being boys and all, we goofed around a lot. Whether we were "sitting" upside-down in our chairs, pulling chairs out from under other people, or devising an even more cleaver and imaginative way to be wild, we had a ball. There were no girls present to impress and despise, no inferior beings to which to flaunt an incredible show of superiority while those of the inferior race looked on in disgust. There were no distractions to prevent us from focusing our full and utmost attention on the task at hand -- being wild. There was this one time a guy PERFECTLY pulled a chair out from under me while I was sitting down. SPLAT! It was a perfect riot! Anyway, the teacher arranged the chairs in a semi-circle around him while he taught. When someone stuck out of the mayhem as being excessively bad, our teacher would scoot the bad boy's chair back 5ft or so, and thus the criminal, the committee misdemeanors, was excluded from the circle of wild savages, all the while, being showered with gestures of shame and mortified that he, a perfect angle, was accused of committing a crime, so heinous in magnitude, as to demanded such an act of retribution.

I usually wasn't bad... well, comparatively, that is. This one time, though, I was rather wild and got scooted back. To make it worse, I said, "Thanks for the ride!" When the roar of laughter subsided, the teacher responded with the imperative command that filled every heart with dread, "See me after class." Needless to say by the end of class, I wished I hadn't been bad that week.