Eat My Salt

<<<<< Hm?

I tutor a first-grader named Collin. Sometimes he likes to stall and take maybe three or four minutes to get his butt to the kitchen table.

I don't really care. I usually just end a text conversations or look through pictures on my phone or read whatever junk is on the table until he comes down.

Yesterday, though, he took a lot longer. I waited.

His house is big. It's expensive. It's that kind of semi-awkward quiet where you're not sure if people are REALLY in other parts of the house, or if they're just lurking around.

I started thinking about The Sound of Music.

Have you ever seen The Sound of Music? There's a part where Maria comes to the Von Trapp family's house for the first time. Their house is big and expensive and awkward-quiet. The housekeeper tells Maria "Wait here, please" and goes to get Captain Von Trapp.

Of course, no one in movies ever "waits there," and Maria ends up in the ballroom, dancing around, only to get discovered by a none-to-happy Captain Von Trapp.

Then there's the part in Princess Diaries when Mia is waiting for the Queen to come downstairs, and she lifts the lid off a random glass container. Of course it makes a loud clatter when she puts the lid back.

Those movie scenes flitted briefly through my head without any real processing. People are stupid, I thought. You know how that is. You think about it, but you don't really THINK about it.

So I kept killing time. I checked my phone, I looked over Collin's spelling test, I centered the centerpiece, I looked at the salt and pepper shakers. They were sort of people-shaped. Maybe. Hm. What were they?

I turned one of the shakers around, expecting to see a face or something decorative, but there was nothing to see. What a boring salt shaker. Or maybe it was a pepper shaker.

Which was it?

Sense of judgement = blank.

*tips shaker over*

*ten thousand tiny white grains spill everywhere*

"Oh, sh't." It was a salt-shaker apparently. With especially large holes.

*hears footsteps coming*

O_O

Here I'd been, judging Maria for wandering into another room, and Mia Thermopolis for peeking into a dish, and what do I do?

I dump salt everywhere.

I'm not proud to say that I just brushed the crap onto the floor and hoped it would disperse enough that it wouldn't be noticed. I'm pretty sure it worked.

*sigh* Moral of the story: Don't judge characters so harshly. Chances are you're every bit as dumb.

~Stephanie

P.S. The next day, they had moved the salt and pepper shakers from the table :3 They probably thought one of their kids did it. Little do they know that on occasion, and eighteen-year-old can be just as childish as a first-grader XD