George & Clara

This morning I went to my aqua-yoga class. Aqua yoga is just like regular yoga except we never do downward facing dog and in the warm water I can stand in warrior three pose forever. There was a new student there today. When I introduced myself she said her name was Clara. Suddenly a memory flashed into my head of a story that I thought I had long forgotten.
When I was about ten our next door neighbors were Clara and George and their daughter Georgina. Georgina was a little younger than me, but she was a nice girl and we often played together. Her mother often invited me into their sparkling clean kitchen and gave us homemade cookies. Clara was a nice lady. I wouldn't go in their house though if George was home. He scared me. He was big and loud and he drank beer. In my tea-totaling home beer was evil. George did not like to change his underwear. I know this because when Clara decided he had worn the same underwear long enough she would try to sneak it off of him while he was asleep. Usually when she tried to do this he woke up. In our kitchen we could hear him yelling, “Get your hands off of my underwear, woman, I'll change it I'm ready!” The worst thing George ever did to me was to steal my stilts. I loved playing on the stilts and could walk the entire length of our long driveway on them. One day George came home with a pet monkey. He set about to build a cage for his monkey and came over and took my stilts, cut them in half and used them for poles for his monkey cage. I was very upset. George never apologized. My dad said to just let it go and Dad took me to the store and bought me new stilts. I never left them in the driveway again. We moved about a year later and we never saw George, Clara or Georgina again.