Frozen Tongue

My bro-in-law loves this story of me. I was 12 years old and extremely naive...so when some class mates told me to put my tongue on a frozen window ledge during recess one day...I did.

Now you know part of the reason why I hate people...not to mention I really don't trust them. Stupid people.

This all came flooding back to me when I saw this news article at MiamiHerald.com. A couple of boys in grade 4 got their tongues stuck to a frozen flag pole. One of the boys tells a reporter, "I decided to try it because I thought all of the TV shows were lies, but turns out I was wrong." He's referring here to all the TV shows that depict people getting their tongues stuck to flagpoles. Apparently there's a lot out there.

Back to my trauma. I remember the panic when I realized my tongue was stuck. To be honest the fact that my "friends" were standing around laughing at me didn't piss me off until much later, when I was at home seething and plotting my revenge.

The real horror was when I yanked my tongue free and saw a little piece of it still on the window ledge. Full-blown panic set in then. None of my friends thought that was funny and they scurried away like the cockroaches they were. All this activity caught the attention of a teacher who came over and took me to the nurse's office. I don't remember a lot of sympathy.

I didn't get a lot from my mother either. My father was in Cyprus at the time...I had a feeling if he'd been there he would have been sympathetic...but reflecting back on the "baby toe incident" perhaps I'm wrong about that.

But the one person who laughed the hardest...and the longest (about 30 years) was my bro-in-law...who wasn't even married to Sis at this point. Anyway, to this day, just thinking about 'the tongue incident' sends him into non-stop laughter.

I didn't see the humour in it until many years later ... and only after experiencing a few more embarrassing 'incidents' that made sticking my tongue to a frozen window ledge pale in comparison.