What Can Happen When You Stick out your Tongue at Someone?

I admired boys in fifth grade who could make gross faces. They could flip their eyelids up so I could see the inside pink that usually covered their eyes. They put their thumbs in their ears and did funny things with their fingers, but the greatest thing was that they could stick out their tongue and curl it up until it touched their nose. All I could manage to do, hard as I tried, was to stick out my tongue and put my thumbs in my ears and repeat “nah, nagh, nah, nagh, nah, nagh” in someone’s face. My classmates would do the same thing back to me.

Then one day on the playground, a teacher told us that if we were making ugly faces and it thundered anywhere in the whole world, our faces would be frozen in position.

My Brownie leader even told our troop that we needed to learn to put on a happy face because a sour or frowny face would eventually become hard as stone. Trying to look pleasant all the time was harder than trying to flip up my eyelids.

There were other important warnings to remember:

• If you go to bed with a wet head, you will get pneumonia. And miss school.
• If you go swimming after eating, you will sink.
• If you go in the ocean alone, you might sink in quicksand and never come back up again.
• If you swallow gum, it will stay in your stomach for seven years.
• If you read in bed with a flashlight, you will go blind.
• If you don’t wear clean underwear and are in a car wreck, everyone will see.

And here is the worst thing that can happen:

If you swallow a watermelon seed, a vine and huge watermelon will grow in your stomach.

Now none of these warnings were true. They were a way to scare us to do the right thing.

Prompt for writing:

Is there one of these admonitions that you still half believe and can hear as a small voice deep inside your brain?

Which one? Write about it.

And have you passed it on?