I thought I’d tell another one of my favorite childhood stories.
In second grade, I managed to tackle a junior high school boy.
At the time I was living with my mom, my aunt Val, and my cousin Jennica. Jennica was in eighth grade, while I was in second grade. And we had to share a room, with bunkbeds and everything.
I was pretty much like her annoying little sister for that year, so I’d follow her all around and want to do everything that she was doing, from trying to read her Sweet Valley High books to learning all of the latest Madonna songs.
I thought she was so cool because she got to stay up later than me, and watch MTV videos that I wasn’t allowed to watch.
Anyway, Jennica and her junior high friends liked to hang out sometimes at the school across the street from where we lived. And that meant I liked to hang around too and pester them.
One day, she was there with a couple of boys. And one of the boys was being absolutely awful to me. He kept making fun of me, and pushing me around, and I was getting madder and madder about it.
I’m part Irish and part Italian so not only am I scrappy, I also don’t take kindly to disrespect.
Finally he looked at me and said, “Oh, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna tackle me?”
And I looked him dead in the eye and said, “Yeah!”
They were all laughing but I was totally serious. I screwed up every ounce of anger I was feeling at all of them laughing at me and being mean to me and making fun of me, and I ran at him with everything I had.
The next thing I knew this thirteen or fourteen year old boy was laid out on the ground cold in front of little adorably petite eight year old me.
For some reason he avoided me after that.
I can’t imagine why, I mean look at this face 😇😁
