Eye contact

Now and then, one gets a clear reminder of our more savage human past.

If you look a dog directly in the eye and maintain that contact, you are challenging its status. He who looks away first admits subservience.

Wednesdays are my lunch buddy day with the little guy at his school. I got there a little late today, and found that he had plunked himself down right in the middle of the group of hostile, unpleasant kids who pick on him.

The battle was not long in commencing. They began to try to tell me all the bad things he had supposedly done. Then I felt a shift, an attempt to probe and challenge my authority. Which is awkward, because as a lunch buddy, I'm not supposed to be an authority figure in the first place, just a friend. And these inner city youngsters already get enough harshness and push-back from the adults in their lives.

So it is as if I was thrust back again into the middle of the kid-pack of my own childhood, and yet, of course, it was different. I felt their hard stares, their barely disguised jibes at both him and me -- but what could I possibly do? For I remember being little myself and how mortified I was as a youngster when a well-meaning teacher stepped into a situation to protect me but only made things worse.

Do I ignore it? Do I tattle-tale? Do I try to turn it around, disarm them with wit and warmth rather than attempting pyschological dominance?

I opted to warn them that I would take the matter to their teacher if it kept up, and then to pointedly ignore them and focus on my lunch buddy, even though my words to him sounded awkward, and I felt very vulnerable, as if they knew I was trying to dodge them rather than confront and win. But in a few minutes, somehow we all got talking about airplanes, which was apparently more interesting to the group than meanness.

I was reminded of what I read somewhere: the only people who want to be kids again, are those who have forgotten how hellish childhood really was.