the time I was "gangster"

 

In the last post here I was describing how startling and surprising it was to me, when a man shoved in front of me in line at the post office.

It seemed so strange - and from that memory, my mind was led to recall another time when someone stepped in front of me in line.  That other time was when I was in third grade.  Thirty-some years earlier than the post office incident.

        That time, the line was in school.  This girl just stepped in front of me and I pushed her to the side and stepped forward to reclaim my place. (!) That might be the only time in my life when I pushed somebody.

LOL.

Even at that moment, I could hardly believe I did it.

        My family had just moved, from Mineral City, Ohio to Rootstown, Ohio.  I think I was a little bit stressed.  We had moved away from my best friend Jackie.  And all the upheaval with your stuff, and being in a new place....

        And it was during the school year.  So I had begun third grade with kids I knew, and our teacher Mrs. Busby.  And then we moved to Rootstown and it was kids I didn't know, and a different teacher, Mrs. Rine.

In Mrs. Rine's class we were doing punctuation.  I hadn't had that at all yet, and I came in in the middle, and I remember I found it kind of difficult, and inexplicable at first.

And that's so weird, because I was a child who read for entertainment... The Bobbsey Twins; Adventure At Black Rock Cave... Why was punctuation hard for me at first?

Just a bunch of changes that I didn't ask for, all at once.  That girl cutting in front of me in line was the last straw, I guess.

Should I have applied the same "gangster" tactic to the man who shoved in front of me in the post office line, 30 years after the third grade incident?  

        There was no way I would have pushed him.  

Older and wiser and more educated and experienced, I did not have the freedom of physical response that I found within myself at the age of 9.

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