Poor, poor, literal me...

Isn’t it interesting how seemingly out of the blue, you can flash on stories from long ago; stories from your childhood that you thought long since forgotten? Yeah, that was a long awkward sentence but, read on. As I was washing dishes last night such a story popped into my head. As I recall, I was about six or seven years old and apparently very literal. While pouring myself a glass of juice I made an awful mess of things by over-filling the glass. When I picked up the glass I splashed much of the juice on to the floor.

My mother came into the room and immediately noticed my “accident.” I was given a small bucket of water and a cloth and told to get every bit of the mess up. Instead of following those instructions, I merely smeared the juice around with the cloth. A few moments later my mother came back into the kitchen; shaking her head she demanded that I put some elbow grease into the task at hand. She went back to the living room only to return to the kitchen five minutes after that to find me on my knees half-way inside the cabinet under the sink where she kept cleaning products. “What are you doing under there? I thought that I told you to get that juice up?” Sheepishly I crawled backward from the cabinet to announce, “I was just looking for the “elbow grease” but, I can’t find it.”