The whisper of the axe

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Inspired by someone on my flist exercising caution based on experience and thus not dying in a horrible car wreck]

The closest I've ever come to just being flat-out no take-backs killed involved the route I took home from grade one. We lived in the tutor's residences on Columbia Street. My school was five or six blocks away up Columbia [1] and there were train tracks about a third of the way from home to school. One day I was walking home, tripped just short of the tracks and as I stood back up, a train came through. I could have covered the distance between me and the tracks in the time it took me to get up.



1: Or much longer via a "short cut" I discovered, which looped all around UW campus and took me by the Tuck Shop in V1 (which was only useful if I'd remembered to hide my money: the teacher used to confiscate any loose change the kids had for some charity or other].

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I am sure if I mentioned it to my father, he'd have had a chat with the teacher. He had a keen grasp of the difference between people who are Nicolls and people who are not Nicolls and there was a real limit to the crap people in the second category were allowed to pull on people in the first.

I remember in high school we had for some reason to bring in letters from our parents acknowledging this or that, which Bill felt was a waste of his time. He had everyone in the family write identical letters asking the principal if he could tell which one letter was the real one, because if they couldn't he was just going have us handle the letters from now on.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, and don't get me started on how people in positions of authority reacted to us calling our parents by their names(That was my older brother's fault. He asked Bill why it was necessary to call him "dad" or Lorna "mom" and since Bill couldn't think of a logical reason, none of us ever had to use anything but their names after that). We knew who they were to us and who cares if outsiders were confused?

[kuangning]

That's *awesome.* I wish my parents had been that logical; we, as children of traditional West Indian parents, got raised on the "because I said so" and "if you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry for" model of child-rearing.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Bill also did that all the time. It depended on how much reaction time you gave him when confronting him with a new idea.