Third grade for me was a long time ago. Much longer than I want to admit, sometimes, but I still remember many things about it. It was the year that I got chicken pox. My parents were told that I needed glasses. One of my best friends in school was a girl named Colleen, but she moved away the next year.

Mostly I remember my teacher. She was probably in her sixties then, but she looked, to us eight year olds, like she was ninety. She had arthritis in her hands and one of her thumbs was bent backwards at the joint. Like, literally backwards. When she would write things on the overhead ( an overhead projector in case you don’t know what that is) her bent-backwards thumb would be superimposed, giant sized, onto the screen that had been pulled down in front of the blackboard.

She also had a lot of aphorisms. Like, “monkey see, monkey do”. And the most memorable one, “Haste makes waste.”

She said that one practically every day ( or so it seemed.) For some reason, I always misunderstood what she was saying and thought she was saying, “Haste makes paste.” Which makes no sense. Obviously.

But, since I was eight, I guess I thought there was some mysterious meaning to it, that I would one day understand, and so, for years it puzzled me, that is, until one day, it came to me and I realized she had been saying “waste” not “paste”.

And the world made sense, finally.