We walked through the school parking lot, into an alleyway then squirmed through a little hole in the fence and ended up in her backyard. It was a cool adventure and a true shortcut -- if you were Marcia. I, however, was not. (She had poker-straight blonde hair that fell to the middle of her back in kindergarten. We were only five. How did she grow hair that long in just five years? Even then, I remember asking myself that question. Kind of a funny thing for a kindergartner to think about, but I was that kind of kid.
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| Sweet, wispy haired kid |
This story is not about Marcia's hair -- although it could be, the hair was that pretty. I mean, it's been fifty-four years since I was in kindergarten. I'm even not sure of the spelling of her first name any more, yet I still vividly remember the hair that the girl had. When she hung upside down on the trapeze* on the playground, her hair touched the ground. That was a big, big thing with the kindergarten set, especially those of us with wispy hair that barely grazed our shoulders.)
*No kidding, this tiny town in Michigan had a trapeze bar on the playground. Why? Who knows? But cool though, right?
Back to the shortcut story:
Not only was I not Marcia (I feel I've firmly established that by this point in my narrative) I also did not live on that side of town and so I had to walk myself all the way back around the block, pass the school, then take my normal route home. It wasn't such a shortcut for me. No, it was actually the opposite of a shortcut, really. It took much, much longer to get home that day than normal and when I did get home I was in hot water. (Duh.)
I've been feeling like I've been taking a lot of those kind of shortcuts lately, whenever I use Jerry's old GPS, to be exact. I swear, that GPS tries to get me to drive to Marcia's house before it takes me home every time I use it.
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