The Gum Thief

      I was the kind of kid who read the Brothers Grimm at five. At six, I puzzled over the difference between crocodiles and alligators (and came to the conclusion that one was a brand name for the other). And at seven, when my friend told me to look out the window, I gave him a blank look and asked, “Window dot com?”
      In other words, from the very beginning, I loved to read and think, and was mostly not very good at either. I tried to be smart, and instead I just managed to sound like a fool. Once, when my dad was doing renovations and sawing some boards in the basement, I sat on the stairs and sighed, “My heart is breaking, for the master is making so much noise.” (More likely, my head was splitting, but in elementary school those details aren’t really important.)
      I liked to curl up in unobtrusive corners of the house and read and mutter witticisms to myself. I dreamed of what my life would have been like if I’d been born to royalty instead of lowly peasants, and thought I was a martyr for cleaning up my clothes when my mom told me she couldn’t see the floor of my bedroom.
      This is probably why I find young children with over-active imaginations and grandiose vocabularies so funny today. (The five-year-old who used the word “salutations” when greeting me is a really good example of this.)
      Also, not long ago (to get to the point of my story, at last...) I witnessed a mother confiscating her young daughter’s gum – and saw the daughter promptly run out of the room and into her own bedroom. I followed her, and saw the little girl open a drawer and pull out yet another piece of gum from a package in the bottom.
      I was pretty sure this gum was stolen from the same place as the first, confiscated piece (the mother’s purse), so I asked, “What do you have there?”
      The child spun around, her face red and guilty. But she recovered quickly, and, narrowing her eyes and crossing her arms, she told me: “You know what? I like you, but you are so nosy!”