Little J Takes Care of Herself

I took Little J to the field by the Second West Chapel so that she could attend her friend Darcy’s end-of-school party. I was not surprised to find that the party was completely unsupervised. Darcy’s parents just dropped the girl off with a couple of coolers full of drinks and treats. There were at least 15 kids there and not a single parent. I didn’t want to completely embarrass Little J, so I stayed in the car. But I parked so that I was in plain sight as a reminder to all that there was a parent around.

The kids spent the first 30 minutes playing football in the field. Little J spent the whole time on the edge of the action doing cartwheels. Whenever the ball came close, she would move to a different deserted spot on the field. I had to admire her tenacity for avoiding any contact with the ball.

There was a boy, whom I later learned was named David D., who started chasing her around the field. He was the biggest kid on the field, while Little J was the smallest. He would catch up to her and then run away. He did this several times. I could tell from watching that she wasn’t liking it one bit. I nearly got out of the car to go have a talk with the boy. I wasn’t planning on scaring him so bad that he would need to go home and change his pants, but I figured I would educate him about bothering a girl who’s dad had nothing better to do than have a man-to-man talk with a clueless boy.

Then a wonderful thing happened. He did it one more time, and just as I reached down to yank the door open, Little J whipped off her shoe and clobbered him. Both he and I were so astounded that she pounded him at least four times before we knew what had happened. Then the boy ran away. He tried to come close to her again a couple more times, and each time she smacked him with her shoe. And she hit him hard. She threw all of her weight into it. I sat back and enjoyed the show, which was pretty short. Within a couple of minutes, the boy had found something else to do, and stayed away for the rest of the evening.

When Little J found out later that I had seen the whole thing, she was worried that I was going to scold her for hitting. I know I should have probably told her that violence was never the solution. But in this case, I thought it was an excellent improvisation. And it was probably a lot less painless to the boy than what my little talk would have been.