At the mere age of twelve, I was a master at writing book reports. Never mind that they were usually about books that didn’t exist, or that they almost always borrowed plot lines from “Leave It To Beaver” episodes. As I did this, I was prepared for the inevitable day when the teacher would put a big, fat zero on my paper and call me out in capital letters for making-up an entire report. When that happened, I was sure I’d immediately be sent to the principal’s office followed by eternal damnation the next day when the morning announcements included my false paper debacle ultimately cluing-in the whole school that I watched “Leave It To Beaver.” And liked it. Then, I figured, my mom and dad would kill me and destroy any evidence that I ever existed because of the shame I brought to our forefathers.

I did it anyway.

So one day, Mrs. Gertrude Carmichael, my Language Arts teacher and proud owner of a wood-paneled station wagon, was passing back our book reports, and I sat there anxiously waiting for mine. As soon as she handed it over, there at the top stared a mean and nasty minus five. The red ink engraving of her pen could be felt through the backside of my wide-ruled paper, erasing any inclination that this was a last-minute bathtub grading mishap.

The resulting grade of a 95 wasn’t what bothered me. It wasn’t even the minus five scrawled at the top. It was the reasoning behind it: I put “the end” at the end. This was the day that I realized that rules like this existed. It was the day sin came into my world. The day I moved from being a child to a youth.

I carried the shame of the minus five for many years, until one day, like waste from an overhead pigeon, it hit me. Some rules are dumb and you only need to learn them to break them.