A true sign of intelligence is learning from past mistakes . . . for example, when I was eight years old and my younger brother Marc was five, we threw rocks at a wasp nest until we struck it, causing an angry swarm of wasps to emerge-- and though my advanced years didn't make me much smarter than my younger brother, I was faster than him, and so he got stung multiple times while I suffered no stings . . . yesterday, when I was forty-seven years old, I was playing tennis with my kids (ages 12 and 13) at the fabulously soft and wonderful courts at East Brunswick High School-- the surface is some kind of padded rubberized acrylic-- and Alex yanked a cross-court backhand and it hit off the scoring tube-- the plastic contraption attached to the net pole that holds a tennis ball for keeping track of games-- and Ian was at the net, near the tube, and he suddenly ran from that spot, swatting with his racket, and when we asked him what was wrong, he claimed that a big wasp came out of a hole in the tube-- so I went over to investigate, and my kids --trusting their dad-- came to see what was up as well, and Ian was right, there was a wasp and it was just sitting there now, on the plastic tube, taunting me with it's venomous belligerence, and so I took my racket, turned it sideways, and decided I would smush the wasp, which had no place on a tennis court-- net play is hard enough-- and just as I struck at the wasp, I noticed that there were several wasps inside the hole, but it was too late-- my smushing stroke was already in motion-- and as I hit the tube, I yelled to my children "RUN!" and a swarm of twenty wasps erupted from various holes in the scoring tube, formed a swirling, buzzing cyclone around the tube, and then splintered off in search of the attackers-- my kids listened to me for once, and they outran the few wasps that flew in their direction, but most of the wasps homed in on me: the most obvious threat to the nest-- so I backpedaled, gracelessly, while simultaneously swinging my racket, and I managed to fend them off . . . by this time my kids had run five courts over, out of range of the angry insects, who then retreated back to their scoring tube/nest so they could terrorize net players on another day (FYI: they live in the tube on the farthest court from the parking lot) and when I joined my kids on the far court, opposite the nest, I told them the story of when Uncle Marc and I threw rocks at the wasp nest in the Poconos and we hit it and ran and Uncle Marc got stung and they said, "Dad, that was when you were a kid . . . you're forty-seven now, haven't you learned anything?"
