Roundabout

One of my kids, I'll call them Cloyce just to give them a name, came home from kindergarten one day all excited about a severe. The teacher had demonstrated severes in class.

I didn't understand what Cloyce was talking about; it had been a long time since I was in kindergarten. I asked for an explanation.

"You know, a severe."

"I can't picture it, Cloyce, sorry."

Cloyce ran and grabbed a small globe of the Earth from the bedroom. "Something round like this. A severe."

Ah, a sphere. Cloyce either wasn't enunciating quite right, or my hearing wasn't picking it up.

He Can Be Taught

Many of us were taught while growing up that if you're carrying a sharp object and you drop it, let it fall. It's great practical advice, you know.

Among the accessories available (I adore alliteration) for the drain snakes I sell are retrieving tools. They are sharp and typically pointed objects. They have to be, so that they may puncture and burrow into a blockage in a drain and retrieve it. 

A year or so back I was carrying not one but two of them into a customer's office. And I dropped both. And I tried to catch them. 

It was like a juggling act which had gone off the rails. There I was trying to corral those two retrievers, each bouncing off my hands one to the other, and each time digging a barb into my palms. "Oh, ah, oh, ow," I repeated many times over trying desperately to grab them. Of course, they ended up hitting the floor anyway.

Why I had two handkerchiefs I don't know (usually only having one) but it was fortunate that day. I had to wrap them around my hands driving home, hoping the bleeding would stop by the time I got there. Tiny puncture wounds take awhile to seal.

The moral of the story, in case you - as I - didn't get the lesson originally: if you drop a sharp object, let it fall.