I shot an elastic in the air, where it lands - d'oh!

If I could only learn to give like a rubber band.

Not long after the puddle-of-pee debacle (see yesterday's post), I found an elastic band on the floor of my first-grade classroom.

As a child of six, I couldn't resist the temptation. I twanged it and it flew through the air until it came to a surprise and sudden stop against my teacher's eyeball.

She let out a muffled cry - probably something like Louis Braille did at age three when he poked his eye with a wayward pruning knife.

Louis, of course, went blind and invented the Braille System. My teacher kept her vision and got angry.

"Put your heads down!" she yelled at the class, and we did. "No one can go home until the person who shot the elastic band confesses."

We held our heads down to our desks for some time, and I started to imagine what it would be like to spend days and days at school like that. What would we eat? How would we go to the bathroom? Or sleep?

What if the guilty party never confessed? Oh yeah: I was the guilty party! I was about to fess up and put everyone out of their misery when the buzzer buzzed, and the teacher released us for the day.

I learned a valuable lesson that day: never confess.