Hero.
Kindergarten. It's my first time in the school library. I'm surrounded by the comfort and tranquility that can be found in the quiet corners of every library. I wasn't able to read yet so my choices of reading material were largely limited to picture books and how-to-draw books. While curled up in a beanbag chair and flipping through Ed Emberley's Big-Ass Green Drawing Book, life was at peace. Then Mrs. Warner walked over to me and asked me how I was doing. I responded by copying something I saw on television: 3-2-1 Contact, to be specific. The previous night there had been a segment with a SCUBA diver who made the universal "okay" hand sign. I found this fascinating and had used it as often as humanly possible. Naturally, I used this sign to respond to Mrs. Warner. I also looked at her through the circle formed by my thumb and index finger, slowly slid it towards her and then back towards myself, and let out a slow drawl of "Ooooookaaaaay." I did this for no readily apparent reason. Enraged, Mrs. Warner orders me never to do it again. I confirmed my agreement with her wishes by doing it again. "Ooooookaaaaay." In response Mrs. Warner flushed the bright red of someone destined for an early hypertension induced grave and from between clenched teeth spat out: "I TOLD YOU NEVER TO DO THAT AGAIN." I've never been all that good at reading peoples emotions. Once again, I convey that I understand her order by doing it again. "Ooooookaaaaay..."
Mrs. Warner snatched my wrist in her vice-like talon and dragged me to the office in what must have taken all of three seconds because I do not remember the trip in between the library and the office. I was slammed into a hard glossy bench made of aspen and epoxy as Mrs. Warner related all the obscenities I brought into the sanctity of the Library. I looked at my shoes. They were high-top Converse with colorful dinosaurs on them, a cartoonish tyrannosaurus rex where the Converse logo should be, and a rubber stegosaurus on the tread of the shoe. I didn't know it then, but these were the coolest shoes I would ever own. Ever. Mrs. Warner and the office secretary determined that my punishment was going to be a scolding by phone from my mother, and Mrs. Warner rode her broomstick back to the library (Please note: the broomstick part may or may not have actually occurred).
At that very moment my mother was winning several lovely decorative wooden ducks and an absolutely divine gift basket at an Officers' Wives' luncheon.
The office secretary was a nice gray-haired old lady with horn-rimmed glasses. I sat quietly with my hands folded in my lap and my head hung in shame. The whole scene could have been taken directly from a Rockwell painting. The secretary attempted to contact my mother and failed. Then she took a fax, talked on the phone to a parent of a different child, and tried my mother once again. And failed. After twenty minutes she looked at me once more in all my ashamed meekness and then made a fateful decision:
"I'm going to call your father."
The sudden shriek of some crazed or wounded animal distracted her for just long enough that she didn't all at once register the heavy object that dove across her desk or the canvas and rubber object that smacked her in the face following the same trajectory. All she saw were tiny colorful dinosaurs. At the same time the principle walked in as staplers and inboxes skittered across the room and a typewriter smashed to the floor. A brief and intense melee ensued, and the combat also drew in the school's nurse and D.A.R.E. officer. I was eventually subdued, but not before destroying my objective. The office telephone was found forced in the corner between the desk and the wall taking up approximately 83% less space than it had previously occupied.
After the Flintstone's chewable sedatives wore off, I woke up on an army surplus cot with an itchy wool blanket over me. Largely due to my wracked sobs, I was never able to fully articulate to them the clear and logical thought process that demanded such decisive action on my part. It seemed they could never understand that I was saving the free world, no matter how simply I explained it.
My father was an officer in the Air Force, and he worked at NORAD. At that age I couldn't possibly comprehend what his real job was (and to be quite honest I'm still not sure what he did). That didn't stop my parents from valiantly trying to explain what he did and how important it was, but my mind boiled down everything they told me to one job description: My father single-handedly operated the machines that prevented the Soviets from ending all life on earth in a rain of nuclear hellfire. I imagined his job like a real life version of Missile Command. I saw hundreds of lines converge on each and every American city (each representing a single city-rending thermonuclear warhead) and even more sleek Russian bombers ripping through Canadian airspace as my father answered the phone and listened to the description of the apparently horrendous gestures I had made. These fools, these madmen, had to be stopped.And that is how I saved the world from a radioactive apocalypse. And that was the first time I was ever sent to the office.