In the Fullness of Time

It was a He-Man action figure, I think, that started the trouble on that spring day early in my teaching career. If you're old enough to remember they heyday of He-Man and his, um, business associates (the name Skeletor ring a bell?), congratulations. (And you do need to have some age on you, as these figures were popular in my kindergarten classroom around the same time as the A-Team and just before Cabbage Patch Kids (bless their ***** little hearts) and Transformers.) If you're not old enough to remember the excitement, if you grew up outside the cultural influence of the USA, or if your memory is like a sieve, never mind. It was a toy, that's all you need to know; a coveted toy, a toy with a definite cool factor, the kind of toy that conferred automatic social standing on its owner, even in kindergarten.

Anyhow, there was a stray He-Man figure, a slightly dusty one that someone had found wedged halfway under a shelf near the block corner. He immediately claimed it as his own property, based on two incontrovertible legal principles (incontrovertible among five-year-olds, at least): first, he'd found it; and second, just in case that didn't carry any weight with others, he was almost certain he'd lost that very figure some time earlier, and lost it in a part of the room that was surprisingly near the shelf in question. At first no one challenged the incontrovertibility of these claims, and he was happily showing it off to all his friends, and growing no doubt in social standing all the while...when up came another child, who promptly rocked the boat by claiming this very He-Man as his own property.

It soon became apparent that this was going to be one of those situations: a he-said, he-said situation, long before Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas came along to popularize that expression, or one almost exactly like it. A glance at the toy in question was of no help in resolving ownership. One He-Man toy looked very like another, after all, extruded as they were from the same plastic molding machine and colored by the same shade of dyes, and other than the dust there were no particular marks that distinguished this particular figure as belonging to either of the boys. No parent had scrawled his or her child's initials on the figure's lower back; no child had affixed a slice of black tape to He-Man's mighty foot for easy recognition; no serial numbers appeared on He-Man's warrious helmet.

"It's mine," said one of the boys, lower lip trembling, "I know it is. I remember."

"It's mine," said the other boy, a catch in his voice. "I recognize it."

Both looked pleadingly at the adult, a.k.a me. A Solomonic situation, I remember thinking, and briefly toyed with the notion of threatening to cut the figure in half. But no, I ducked, and simply suggested that they try to work out a fair way to solve the problem. That, after all, was high on the list of values at the school, the ability to talk about problems and come to an agreement that would be, um, agreeable to both parties. (I note here that few of my former students seem to have gone into politics.) "Take a few minutes," I said, "talk about it, see what you come up with. When you have a plan that you think will work, let me know."

Off they went. And a few minutes later they were both back. The quivering lower lip was still, the tremor in the voice had ceased. "We worked it out," they told me in unison. And they had. "First I get it for ten years..." said the boy who had found it below the shelf.

"And then I get it for ten years," added the other boy.

It was a fair deal, on its surface, but I couldn't help feeling there was a flaw in their plan somewhere or other...