A friend called me today. I hadn’t spoken to her in a couple of weeks.
“Something really embarrassing happened to me, and because you spend your time publicizing all of your embarrassments, you were the first person I thought of,” she said.
This was not the first time a friend has told me this. I shoved it back into the corner of my brain where I store things I’d rather not think about right now.
My friend proceeded to tell me that she spent an evening at parent-teacher conferences. It was only when she got home that she realized that the entire time she was at school, her pants were completely undone.
“And nobody even told me. Nobody pointed it out. Thank God it was only Hebrew school.”
Well, I can’t imagine any of my kids’ teachers saying: “So and so is a very good student, but we wish he wouldn’t call out so much. Oh, and I see London, I see France…”  The very thought of this all is just horrifying, especially given my current underwear situation. (I do happen to know this friend well enough to be certain that her underwear situation is more dire than my own.)
I had to end the conversation because I was playing school with the girls. I am always the student, unless I am serving snacks, in which case I am the lunch lady. I am never the teacher. But if I were, I would be the kind of teacher that would say to a parent, “Honey, I love your kid, but you may want to button your pants. Oh, and do yourself a favor and burn that grandma underwear. Pronto.”