Been there, done that

I grew up in a small town, going to a school small enough that you could get to know everyone in your graduating class. And though there were kids coming in and leaving, for the most part we all moved from grade to grade, all knowing each other, developing our social skills within a small set, finding our social status on the playground.

It wasn’t hard to figure out. One game of kickball would do it. And though I was never picked last, I was never far from it, usually right before the overweight kid and the special ed girl.  It wasn’t that I didn’t look like I could kick the ball, but probably because I carried around free-reading books with weird stuff on them. My favorite was one with a woman centaur on it, her bare chest carefully covered with her long hair for PG correctness. She was running from a tribe of spear-toting, plant warriors, and if I remember right the field was on fire. A man was on her back, arms and legs askew as he was carried backward just to add some spice.

My fourteen-year-old self only saw the excitement, but my forty-eight-year-old self can now recognize the satire of a naked man being carried away from a field of warrior asparagus on the back of a powerful woman. (See, she has a sword.)

Yep. I was that girl, and I didn’t mind much when I was picked last for things because I knew stuff they didn’t. i.e. what a centaur and a naked man were doing on an alien planet to begin with, much less what they had done to tick off aggressive vegetables.

Today, I am finding myself laughing, shaking my head as those same ugly feelings from elementary school unexpectedly burble up, But it’s okay. The strength is there, too, because I know why that man is riding backward, and they never will.