My son Clyde has a new friend in his kindergarten class; in fact, they get along so well that I was quite surprised to receive a note from their teacher informing me that Clyde had been mean to this boy: He not only took his new friend’s Sacajawea dollar away from him, but he also tossed it into the grass on the edge of the playground, from where it could not be recovered. Of course I was mortified: Up until then Clyde’s kindergarten misbehavior, while definitely a daily feature, was more rambunctious than mean. Now, however, I was presented with the distressing picture of some poor little boy diconsolately searching the weeds for his long lost dollar, all because of Clyde. The more I thought about it, the worse it got: What if this dollar had had sentimental value? What if it was the last gift he had ever received from his beloved, now departed, Grandma? (Maybe his Grandma liked the casinos.) How, I wondered, would their burgeoning friendship ever survive such a rift?
Clyde, on the other hand, was unfazed.
“It’s ok,” he insisted. “I told him he could punch me in the head as many times as he wanted, and now he’s not mad anymore.”
I was a little harder to convince: Somehow it seemed doubtful to me that a few dope slaps could serve as adequate reparations for anybody, even a kindergartner. Still, the little boy didn’t seem mad when I had picked Clyde up from school that day; they were wrestling and laughing as if nothing had happened. Even so, I was determined that Clyde feel the consequences of his actions by replacing the missing Sacajawea dollar, and soon: The two boys would be attending soccer practice together that very afternoon, and I could not imagine facing his parents without at least a token gesture of restitution.
To that end, we needed another Sacajawea dollar; luckily, we didn’t have to look very far: Clyde’s sister, Clementine, has quite a stash of the chubby gold coins. To make sure he understood that he would be the one replacing the coin, though, I showed him that we were taking one of his dollars out of his Spiderman pencil case bank before going next door to buy a replacement dollar at our local arbitrager. (True to the rapacious nature of her newly chosen profession, Clementine tried to charge Clyde two dollars for one coin.)
Next came the delivery; as I nudged Clyde forward to present the hard won dollar to his little friend I hoped that it would be enough to repair their tattered friendship. I guess I’ll never really know the answer to that question, since neither the boy nor his parents had any idea what was happening.
“I told you it was ok,” said Clyde. “We made up at school.”
I realized then that he was telling me the truth.
“How many times did he punch you, anyway?” I asked, slightly fearful of the answer.
“Two times–really hard.” Still laughing about it, they went off to play soccer.
Suddenly, as I watched them happily wrestle their way down the field, I had an epiphany: Maybe we should all solve our problems the Clyde way. I know there are plenty of times when I would have gladly taken any number of punches to the head just to get out of saying “I’m sorry–I’m wrong–I messed up” one more time. Who knows: Maybe even our world leaders might want to consider it as an alternative to sanctions; at the very least it would be entertaining. Although, come to think of it, this might be a game that our leaders have been playing all along. I can think of one leader in particular who has clearly taken a few blows to the head too many–perhaps during his glory days at Yale.