Checked Read Free Page A

begin to brainstorm as I get situated at my corner desk.
    Hmm…my parents always tell me that I was a horrible baby. Always screaming.
    Not sleeping unless I was on my mother’s chest. But maybe that is how babies are for the most part. Maybe Melanie and Mandy were just exceptionally good. Perhaps Jared was only different because he was a boy. Or maybe he seemed really easy because he came right after me. Could this really have started that early though?
    “Excuse me.” A stick-thin girl with a campus sweatshirt interrupts me. “Can you help me with my paper?” She looks to the left, most likely toward the computer where she is working.
    She thinks I am going to go over there? Clearly a freshman. I smile at her as patiently as I can and explain the process of emailing me the paper, attaching questions, and getting a response within a half hour.
    “Oh. I just thought…” She drifts off. Thought what? That I would actually take a job where I had to sit and talk with college freshmen? That I would sit close to them and hear them chomp their gum as I worry that they’ll accidentally spit while they are talking to me? So close that I can smell their not always clean clothes and the scented sprays they’ve used to disguise their poor laundry habits? No, thanks. Sorry, freshman. {Cue Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” }
    She is still standing in front of me. I manage to give her a smile before she turns to go back to her computer. It’s not entirely her fault that I find her disgusting.
    This is probably her first college paper, and she really does look worried. I turn on the laptop sitting on my desk so I’m ready for the arrival of her email.
    Back to early memories. So why did the baby version of me scream so much? Not bathed enough? Not changed enough? Maybe I was scarred from my experience with swimming in filthy amniotic fluid for months. Maybe a questionable looking doctor gave me my first shots. 
    Or was the baby me just afraid that if I stopped crying I’d be left alone with my own scary thoughts? Were they already there?
    Perhaps my mega-intense doctor man can tell me if this is even possible. Surely this couldn’t have been what he meant by earliest experiences though. I really think he meant early as in I could hold my head up and eat solid food but not old enough that I had my driver’s license yet.
    I don’t have the chance to finish this enchanting conversation with myself because my computer dings. That means I have a paper to check.
    My freshman. Brittany at Computer 7, so says her help ticket email. No paper is attached to the email. Just a question about making a cover page. She’s only on the cover page? Looks like I will be spending my whole shift with Brittany.
    I type her a quick response, attaching some “standard” cover page examples.
    Back to my “standard” question. I begin to write my response, and other than four dings from Brittany, I am pretty much left alone…
     
     
     
    The Evil Forks and the
    Dangerous Mouse Droppings
     
     
Some of my earliest fears were based on some simple fatherly advice. I don’t even know exactly why the advice was given; I’m sure my brother, Jared, and I were doing something questionable to bring it on though.
At dinner, Dad told me that a person could get something called “Lockjaw” from having a fork stabbed into his or her skin. Lockjaw sounded pretty scary.
For the next few years, every fork I saw became a nemesis. Luckily, I found that I could eat many foods without having to use utensils. (Knives and spoons were probably okay, but how could I know for sure? Dad hadn’t said one way or another on other eating devices so I thought it was safest to avoid them all.) But I couldn’t avoid them all of the time. Every week (usually during the weekend), there would be four index cards sitting on the kitchen counter, four lists of chores. One for my brother, one for each of my sisters, and one for me. Ah…the dreaded list. Mine