We all grew up with rules. Some of them, look both ways before crossing, made sense and I still obey them. Some of them, chew each bite of your food 32 times, didn't make sense (that one was based on the notion that since you have 32 teeth, you should chew once for each tooth and was originally invented by Horace Fletcher as a means of losing weight, the idea being that you would absorb nutrients while chewing and then spit out the rest; like so many things, this evolved into something not intended, in this case chewing 32 times before swallowing). I never managed to do it; I hadn't the patience to not swallow much sooner than that.
I spent a good deal of my childhood figuring out ways around these rules. The first one that I remember out-thinking was not being allowed to count on my fingers when I was adding in school. But, it was easier if I counted on my fingers! And, indeed, now children are given objects to count so that they will understand the concept. Since I was forbidden to use my fingers, I used my tongue to count on my teeth. If I ran out of teeth, I could flex the toes in my shoes. And, by the time we got above the number of teeth and toes I had, I no longer needed to "cheat".
Another rule that I circumvented was reading after bedtime. It was hardly fair of my parents to make a rule like that, because if you will remember, when we lived in the trailer I would hear them reading aloud to each other as I fell asleep and so having a story for as long as I was awake had become part of my bedtime routine. When I was older and had a real bedroom with a real door, my parents could see under the door if I had the light on, so I got a flashlight and read under the covers. It wasn't long before my mother found the flashlight hidden under my pillow, which she has explained since that she would have ignored if it hadn't been so hard to get me out of bed in the morning. However, it was so she took it away from me and I knew that she would just find another. However, in much the spirit of counting on my teeth, I found a way around it. I had a large, cabinet radio with the huge vacuum tubes that such things contained. If I turned it around to face the wall, turned it on with the volume at zero, and tented the spread over my head and the radio, I could read by that light just fine.And we already know that when Daddy took my library card away from me for getting home late, I got (and hid) a replacement by claiming I had lost it and paying a quarter. And that when my high school counselor wouldn't agree to let me take German and Latin at the same time, I got her signature by coming back when she was in a hurry to go home for the weekend and offering to drop French.
5 comments:
Reading by the light of the radio, eh? Where there's a will ...
I never could figure out why we were supposed to chew 32 times before swallowing & just figured this was yet another of my Dad's slightly OCD-ish rules ("Milk goes in the refrigerator facing out!"): I always learn something new at your site.
I guess it's true that there are some rules (reading when - or in my case, what - you're not supposed to be reading) that are just made to be broken.
I was the youngest of 5 girls and we were always breaking one rule or another and blaming another sister. It was very confusing for our parents.
I broke rules all the time, much to my mothers' consternation, but being an only child, I had no one else to blame, so I invented an imaginary companion. You were quite a smart little devil, weren't you?
I was an only child for the first five years and had to fall back on an imaginary companion to blame, myself. I can remember my great-grandmother telling me, "You can figure it out, you know" and she died when I was about four, so that was very early reinforcement.
Yes, I was a smart little devil. And every little once in a while I let that part of me get me what I want even today. After all, counting on teeth and reading by the light of the vacuum tubes didn't hurt anyone.
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