After some thought, I’ve decided to postpone The Christmas Caper until Christmastime.

As it is now Fall, I think it’s best to proceed with a Fall story. Ahh Fall, the beginning of the school year. It’s always been one of my favorite parts of the year. When I was little, I loved crunching leaves underfoot and the smell after it rained. I used to stand outside when the rain started coming down and watch it speckle the sidewalk in front of my house. I adored Fall.

Of course with Fall, there’s inevitably the beginning of school. Fall is when you gather all of your binders, pens and flashcards, with high hopes that you’ll stay organized and “on top of things” for the rest of the semester. Yes, armed with fluorescent highlighters and crisp new notebooks, you’re ready to do battle. Class, do your worst. (Two or three weeks later is often when your highlighters turn tail and retreat as a massive load of reading assignments bears down from the North).

Unfortunately, I was much less optimistic about the whole “school” thing when I was a little kid. I often had other priorities that I considered drastically more important. The year I was supposed to move on from preschool to kindergarten, I demanded that my parents hold me back because I was so mortified of going to the doctor’s office to get “The Kindergarten Shot.”

Luckily I didn’t really have much of a say in that situation–or I might still be in preschool now. The best thing about kindergarten was the “crayon melt.” I don’t remember anything else I did. The crayon melt was glorious. It was a heated pad where you could put a piece of paper and draw on it with crayons. The crayons would melt and smear and dribble wonderfully all over the place.

Inevitably, almost every time I used the crayon melt I would get so wrapped up in melting the crayons that any picture I created morphed into a swirling mix of all the colors and eventually a massive puddle of brownish wax. I brought home page after page of these monstrousities to show my parents.

Soon I decided to create my own crayon melt at home–the one at school was the best toy in the room, and was therefore a hot commodity among Kindergardeners. I taped a piece of paper to my desk lamp, right where the metal shade would be heated by the bulb, and found that I could melt crayons that way too.

Given that I had now created my own crayon melt at home, I decided I had no further use for school. I decided to stop going. Of course, this whole not-going-to-school thing called for a strategic plan of action. After much thought, I settled on the best solution–I would glue myself to the wall! The logic was simple: if I can’t leave the house, I can’t go to school. If I’m stuck to the wall, I can’t leave the house. Thus, my parents will be forced to accept that I will not be going to school anymore.

Telling no one of my plans, I went to bed early that night–tomorrow would be a highly important day. Tomorrow would be the end of school, forever.

~to be continued~

Next week: An Inconvenient Ruse