BULLIES
If you’ve seen the video of a big boy slamming his little tormenter, you probably have mixed feelings---or maybe not.  It shows the hall of what seems to be a school, with one boy, (We’ll call him brutus) being poked and tormented by a much smaller boy (call him peanuts).  Brutus tells peanuts  over and over to stop, but peanuts is having too much fun showing off to a group of other boys.  Finally, Brutus grabs peanuts, lifts him up and slams him to the floor.  Peanuts limps away. 
    I had a son who was big for his age. A boy who outgrew the shoulders of his shirts before he grew into the sleeve length.  My Brutus was not overweight, he was big boned.  In fact, as a man, he was told by a doctor to ignore the weight charts, as his bones weighed more than the charts called normal range for his height.  He wore a 17 ½ neck shirt to his Senior Prom, and  another inch larger as a man.  (And yes, he played Varsity football)
    His problem started in about the 3rd or 4th grade, when all boys are super heroes and all girls are ballerinas.  The little boys started picking on him, and if he hit back, Teachers scolded him and told him he was ‘too big’ to hit smaller boys.  He told me nothing about all this, but it went on for some time.  Classmates (sometimes two or three at a time) tried again and again to best him. I had impressed him before he ever started school that he should hit back if someone hit him first, but since he was bigger than his playmates he shouldn’t “drive them into the ground”. I knew he followed that in the neighborhood, where I could quietly observe what was going on.
So I was not surprised to see him in a tussle with a neighbor boy on his way home from school. The boy was poking at him much like we saw peanuts doing to brutus in the video. My son pushed him away, and finally, down.   The boy came at him like a bull, ramming into his back, and the fight was on in earnest. A lot of pushing and punching, and finally my Brutus walked away, leaving him lying in the snow.  I watched for a moment to be sure he got up and continued on home.
    What was that all about?” I asked Bruce when he came in. 
    “Oh, I dunno. He keeps doing that.”  At school, I can’t do anything though. The teacher says I’m too big to hit kids back.”  His tone clearly showed he knew how unfair that was. 
     I decided to go to the school and try to straighten things out. Of course, I well knew I couldn’t go in as an avenging mom. Teacher’s are, after all, just trying to keep the peace among groups of kids she’s responsible for.  But first, I decided, I’d talk to my neighbor. We were good friends, so I wanted her to hear what happened. She smiled a bit ruefully, and said, “ I’m afraid that may be my fault. In trying to get him to eat I’ve said to him, ‘How do you ever expect to get big enough to beat (Brutus) if you don’t eat’?” I winced, and she nodded, and continued, “His Dad and I will talk to him.” she promised.
    Next I called the school, and asked for a meeting with his teacher.  When we met, I told her what Bruce told me.  She stiffened a bit, but let me go on. 
    “I know you have a tough job sometimes, keeping order with a class room full of nine-year-olds, but the fact is,  they are all nine years old.  Including my son.  I know the other boys are no match physically for him, but he is no match in maturity to you.  He sees it as totally unfair that the other kids can hit him, and he can’t hit back. And there are no consequences to the smaller boys.
    “I have taught him that he can hit back, but only as hard as they hit him.” I continued.  “He has been pretty good about that, I think.”
    “But I can’t let them battle it out in my classroom,” she countered, “I just can’t let that happen.”
    “No,” I agreed. “But you could assign some kind of penalty for
 hitting.”
           ‘Yes,” she said, “I see what you mean.  That would be more fair”
          Of course, there was a lot more to the conversation before we got to that agreement.  I’ve sort of ‘cut to the chase’ here.
                 . 
    And of course, that didn’t stop the boys on the way home.  What stopped that was ’my Brutus’ hitting them back.  In kind,  not full force. And if it had to ’escalate’ a little….well, it worked, and no one was ever really hurt.
                                     
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MAKING DO

My mother recycled before there was such a word!  At least most people hadn’t heard it. They just called it “making do”.  And make do she did!  This was, after all, ‘The Great Depression’
    If she wanted sour cream for sliced cucumbers, she simply added a few drops of vinegar to a little milk, and Voila! It “made do” for the cream.
Home made ice cream was made with bits of cream saved from the top of each bottle of milk until she had enough.  (Homogenized milk was still a product perhaps not yet available, or was higher in price.)
     In many recipes she used substitutes lest costly, such as cracker crumbs in place of eggs, where the eggs were thickeners. And speaking of eggs, she could, lacking an egg beater, make meringue with a fork!
    Cotton bed sheets, not having polyester in them in those days, wore out in the middle with distressing speed.  Mother would cut them lengthwise down the middle, sew the two sides together, and have the ‘good’ parts again in the sleeping area.  When that sheet wore out, she would make pillow cases and underpants for me out of the tops and bottoms. Parts ‘too thin to be good’ became bandages or dust rags.
  
    But the one I remember best is the coat she made me one year.  This was Buffalo, New York, and the winters there are cold and snowy. We found with some dismay that my winter coat didn’t fit me. Actually, it didn’t fit the year before, and now it wouldn’t even come together in the front, much less button. I had grown taller as well, and now the sleeves stopped not much below my elbows..  What to do.  There was no money for new coats. 
    My mother had sisters living in town, and my Aunt Bertha offered an old coat of hers that mom might cut up and make me one that would at least fit. Mom was happy to accept. Patterns were ten cents, so she made one of newspapers using my old coat taken apart as a guide. Then she discovered that the inside of Aunties wool coat was a like-new mint-green! Just the thing for my red hair.  Sewing on a crotchety old treadle machine, mom fashioned a coat for me, complete with black velvet pieces (salvaged from Aunties’ worn collar) trimming my collar points.  I felt like a princess!
   
    Recycling will never, ever, match ‘Making do’