George Pemulis's Guide to Living Righteously; part 1

For years this one incident would find itself floating into my mind at the most adventitious of moments. So often does it come up even now that I am thoroughly convinced that, along with having been calamitously plagued by jealous and all-around bad/talentless school teachers, this ridiculous decision and string of events has played an overly strong role in the shaping of my character and disposition. December, 198x. My older brother Michael and I had been taken to see a shopping mall Santa by our mother Avril's college-time friend Lorraine. The beginning of the memory has always been rather spotty; we both presumably sat on Santa's knee, told him we wanted this and that, and then received -- and I can't even be sure of this -- a plastic Star Wars figure. What's important is that post-Santa-visit, we each had similar, but different (very important) plastic toys of some kind. For whatever ridiculous reasons that children have I seem to have been convinced that mine was severely lacking in quality compared to Michael's, and as 5, 6, 7, or 8 year-old spoiled brats are wont to do, I screamed and cried and wailed that I didn't want my crappy plastic toy because it was so clearly not nearly as good as my older brother's. I can hope that perhaps that consumerist-to-be overindulged little shit was put in his place with a swift swat to the head, but more than likely I just got told to get over it or some such thing. I failed to take that advice, however, (even to this day it seems), and to reinforce how useless my Star Wars toy was, I -- and now the memory becomes crystal clear -- walked down an aisle in Eaton's and dropped that no-good toy behind a cardboard box never to be found again. Was the purpose to make a point? To prove that it was really so inferior to my brother's that I would rather have nothing? Perhaps it was in the spoiled delirium of a middle-class Western child that if that one was gone I would receive another, better version of the lost thing. Whatever it was, I'm sure that none of the outcomes fit any of the hopes that my younger self might have envisioned. Later -- and now we're back to fuzzy memories -- I was surely reprimanded; "where is your XXXXX toy?"; "did you throw it away?"; etc. And then, and this may very well be a coping-based formed memory, we went back to where I thought I may have disposed of said toy to find it, but it was, of course, nowhere to be found. And why has the loss, by my own hand, of a worthless plastic toy that by my own claim was vastly inferior to another worthless plastic toy left such an indelible mark on my mind for a continuous period of nearly thirty years? Was this part of where I first learned that you only miss the sun when it starts to snow, only know you love her when you let her go, etc...? And so for a long time this incident would come into my mind and I would feel sadness and I would wonder, "why did I throw that away?".

Lesson #1: Don't throw toys away in department stores given to you by shopping mall Santas just because you don't think they're as good as someone else's. You'll regret it for the rest of your life.

Tune in next time when we discuss taking the 4 minutes to sign up for a frequent flyer card!