God deserves a little dose of karma too ...

I was an only child for my first ten years and kind of bossy (gee, imagine that) and so I played alone a lot and, before you start feeling sorry for me, that’s exactly how I liked it. The summer before kindergarten I was four and my mother built a play kitchen for me in our backyard out of GIGANTIC cardboard boxes (well they were gigantic to me but were really just big toilet paper boxes). She made me a fridge and a stove and a sink made from a big plastic bowl shoved into a cutout in one of the cardboard boxes. She used to stock my “cupboards” with “food” by opening her food containers, you know cans and boxes and such, upside down so that when they were in my cupboard they’d still look closed – like new groceries. I played house endlessly that summer in that little kitchen. In fact, I think I “cooked” in that kitchen more than in any other since. The downside of my little kitchen and its containers that summer was that it occasionally attracted ants – especially on the really hot days. Long, fat streams of ants. The ants intrigued me. I used to follow their trail to see where they were going, try to figure out which ones were the daddy ants, the mommy ants and the baby ants (imagine my disappointment later when I found out there was no such thing but I digress). I would randomly squish one or two, or six, along the trail, or put food or some other obstacle in their way, or pour Kool-Aid on them … just to watch the chaos that would ensue. I think I even tried eating one once and I clearly remember serving a few to my dolls, placing my microscopic victims on my tiny plastic dinnerware and cutting them in half with a tiny plastic knife …well, admittedly that was a little over the top but anyway ... I think me and the ants might be analogous to God and us. Seriously. God has been messing around with me and the people around me on my trail for the last two years and random chaos has indeed ensued! I think it’s time for God to shift his focus and move on down the trail – or get called into the house by his Dad to take a bath – cuz that always saved the ants from me.

At the end of that summer, clothed in Bermuda shorts and tap shoes (and I don’t remember why) my 4-year old brain decided it would be a good idea to jump off the top of my swing set – as if that wasn't stupid enough – I jumped while my tongue was sticking out (you know in concentration) and when I landed my teeth gnashed together sharply, uppers and lowers nearly meeting and came seriously close to severing the tip of my tongue completely off, cutting nerves and turning me into an amazing bloody sprinkler. Who knew baby teeth could do that much damage? It required several stitches, a lot of undignified kicking and screaming while being strapped to a gurney (which I'll never forget made me and my mom hysterical) and finally resulting in a Cindy-Brady-like lisp that took years of speech therapy to control but never cure. Anyway, I’ve always thought of that as my payback for messing with the ants. What do you suppose karma has in store for God considering the huge amount of random chaos he initiates with his ants????

I'd buy tickets to see that.

Important side note -- during the car ride home I fiddled with the new stitches so much, moving my tongue around my teeth, that the lead stitch came untied and the whole thing unraveled and I had to go right back to the emergency room and get it done all over again. Yeah. Again.

It's true what they say about karma being a bitch.