The Incident of the Shoelace (and other childhood memories)

By Alissa Rothman Word count: 598

Ah, childhood; the open universe of fart jokes, the hours of Sesame Street, the long nights of stories about knights and princesses, the afternoon naps and the Power Ranger and Barbie lunchboxes.
Everyone has childhood memories, unless you are a Benjamin Button or had them permanently erased from your brain because, yes, some of them are excessively painful.
Childhood memories are an essential part of what makes us who we are now, and though we have all changed from the Backstreet Boy worshipping girls and Pokémon obsessed boys we once were, it is those memories that are the foundation for the rest of our lives.
Take one of my deepest, darkest childhood secrets as an example.
One Wednesday when I was in first grade waiting in line for the bus, two kids in my class, Todd and Jesse, asked me to tie their shoelaces together super tight. In fact they told me to TRIPLE KNOT it.
I told them it was a stupid idea, that they would never be able to untie it, but after some persuasion I tied the knots. After some practice trials up and down the line, the two were doing pretty well for a three-legged walk.
However, the problem arose when the bus arrived and they couldn’t untie the knots. All three of us frantically tried to untie them, but in vain. As the two tried to hobble to the bus, they tripped on top of each other, leading the aids to believe they were in a fight, while subsequently creating a domino effect as those behind them in line also toppled over.
It postponed the buses, and the next day we were called down to the principal’s office. There she interrogated the three of us, and as I tried to argue my innocence, stating that it was their fault for coming up with the idea in the first place, I was abruptly halted by this rhetorical question.
“If someone told you to jump of the Empire State building, would you do it?”
Now that I am older (and would like to think wiser) I can come up with at least a dozen snappy remarks to this statement, but to my meek first grade mind it was all to much, and I subsequently burst into tears.
Over and over she repeated this question, until she finally left me alone in my distress and turned to the two boys. By then, I could hardly think. I just shook and cried, replaying the question in my head.
“If someone told you to jump of the Empire State building, would you do it?”
This is the one bad mark on my record, and still haunts me to this day. I remember even in first grade, thinking that this would stay with me forever, crying to my parents that I would never get into college now that I had a record as a shoelace tying criminal as they tried to keep from laughing at my naiveté.
Though I initially walked away from this experience thinking the only life lessons to be taken from it were that principals are mean people, that Wednesdays are bad and that one should never triple knot a shoelace, over time I have come to see its deeper meaning.
The memory now serves as one of my first encounters with peer pressure, and its effects.
Even now, when I feel pressured into doing something that makes me uncomfortable, I can still hear Mrs. Garcia in the back of my head, and reminding me to do the right thing. Oh, and I still hate Wednesdays.