I Was Teaching A Class Last Night When I Received the Following Text From Talmage--Age 11

"We had an accident. Finn apparently wanted to have lunch at 5:30, and he started to walk on the counters, and as he walked across the sink's counter he plummeted to the ground. At the time, I was downstairs and I heard a loud thunk and a delayed scream. I ran upstairs and saw Finn on the ground with blood all over the floor. In the process, being me, I vomited in the sight of so much blood. Finn supposedly fell on his face and had a killer bloody nose. I ran to the bathroom and grabbed practically a whole roll of toilet paper . . ."

You'd think I'd be alarmed about the ER visit that was sure to follow, but mostly I just want to give him full props for his word choice. His use of commas to offset an appositive from the rest of the sentence ain't too shabby either.

1988

In third grade I had a retainer. This made me a little bit of a celebrity. Crowds of 8-year-olds would gather under the lava hot metal slide on the lower playground at Upland Terrace Elementary and I would stand proudly and triumphantly pull out that molded piece of pink plastic and the multitudes would ooh and ahh. It was a harbinger of good things to come.

One day as I sat in the lunchroom eating my friend's tuna fish sandwich, a skinny kid with brown hair approached and asked to see my retainer. I warned him that I was eating lunch and it would probably look gross. He insisted, and as I pulled it out of my mouth, gobs of masticated tuna and relish stuck to the mold, to the wires, to my lips. I proudly displayed the half-digested-food decorated dental appliance.

It was gross.

That boy was Alonzo Tyler Howe. We got married a short 14 years later.

(After he got a perm, but that's another story.)