Coming of age, Pt.III

The year before they taught us to add and to subtract was our last year at kindergarten and they’d make us do this really awful thing, or activity as they called all their Third Reich pedagogical rulings, and it involved a piece of cloth I think a flannel or something and also some knitting needles and the mimeographed drawing of a duck we’d poorly color in green or blue crayons or something.
The whole idea was for us to place the drawing of the duck over the flannel on the table, the cloth acting out as a buffer against the hardwood surface, and us kids would have to pluck out the duck itself free from the rest of the paper by doing tiny wholes with the knitting needles around its edges.

They called it puncture-whatever and I hated it because I really hated coloring ducks with blue crayons, also I’d rather be talking about who was cooler in the A-Team instead: Hannibal or Murdock though most of the kids, well they just loved Mr. T themselves back in those days.