2:36 pm | 06 June 2003 | entwigged; "weeee!"

This is beautiful.

When I was four (shortly after my mother remarried), we were at my new stepfather's softball game, and I was playing with one of his friends, a man named Dave Ross. I was a small, trusting, bobbley-headed child, and Dave Ross held me in his arms, airplane-style, flying me about the field. "Weeeee!" he cried. "Weeeeee!"

As we walked towards the parking lot, a tree approached. "Weeee!" Dave yelled, foolishly. "Oooo, I'm gonna run you right into this tree!" He feinted towards the tree, my tiny infant body cradled loosely in his arms.

Dave Ross' powers of spatial relation, when feinting, were less-than-stellar. With a final "weeeeeeee--" Dave Ross slammed my small, blonde head into the tree.

As my mother relates, I didn't cry. I had the imprint of the tree's bark in my forehead as I looked around, probably stunned into silence with shock at the gall of this man who had rammed me, head-first, into a tree, after pretending I was an airplane. Clearly I was not an airplane. I was a toddler.

The only other thing my mother really remembers about the entire escapade is that Dave Ross' birthday is on Valentine's Day (is randomness genetic?). So, wherever you are: Wee on, Dave Ross. Wee on. clm.