So for the longest time when my kids were bad, my wife and I used to tell our children that we had a former child who was “bad” and we’d sent him away to “the boy store”. His name was “Gary”.
Our kids were smart and basically knew we were messing with them, but they could never be quite 100% sure.
This was originally intended to keep them from being bad but over time it was just kind of funny, so we came up with more and more elaborate stories of Gary and all the bad things he’d done. And how he might come back someday.
Then one day, Gary showed up at the front door.
It wasn’t “the” Gary. It was my former student Gary Belvin. We were going to go get some coffee and talk about crypto or something.
Poor Gary. He’s a nice guy from a big family, obviously liked kids. He couldn’t understand for the life of him why our kids ran screaming to another room the minute he introduced himself.
