One of my first memories from childhood was settling into the apartment my parents got when we moved to Virginia. (Before that, we'd lived in Connecticut, but I don't remember anything about that, except for a vague sense of what the living room was shaped like.) The Rebel Manor Apartments (god, what a name...) When we'd lived up north, we weren't that far away from my aunt and uncle, so when my mom needed a babysitter, she just called my Aunt Sue. Now that we were hundreds of miles away from family, my mom had to try out a few teenage daughters of people my dad knew from work.

We cycled through a few of them before my mom found the woman who eventually ended up being my babysitter until I was about 15 (not that I needed a baby-sitter for the afternoon by that point, but occasionally my parents went away for the weekend.)

There was Vickie, who was very tall, with thick black hair, and once the woman downstairs looked after me for a while (she was also the first person to give me a cup of coffee, which was more warm milk and sugar with a dash of coffee flavoring in it, but it was a start, and I wasn't even four years old yet and I still remember wanting to 'wheedle some coffee out of Mizzus Evelyn'). Then there was Jeannie.

I remember was being put into my crib for naptime. My 'bedroom' was the same room as the guest room. I could see the spare bed from my crib, with it's white numbly comforter. You know, my dad still owns that bed, and it's still got the same white numbly comforter on it. My mother always had pretty much the same rule about naps and bedtime that I do with Jess; I don't care if you sleep, just go to your room, get in bed, and stay there.

So, frequently while 'napping,' I would talk to myself or my toys or hum or whatever. The babysitter, a curly-haired, freckle faced girl named Jeanie, yelled at me for not sleeping. So I stopped talking to my toys, but I was a little confused and upset. Her voice... sounded wrong to me, somehow. Angrier than it should have for what I considered to be a minor offense. I was an asthmatic as a child, which I outgrew, and then later got again in college, and because I was upset, I started wheezing. Jeanie yelled at me for that, too, because obviously if I was wheezing, I wasn't sleeping. And it suddenly occurred to me that she wasn't in the living room, where she should have been (and wouldn't have heard me wheezing anyway). She was in my parent's room and I couldn't figure out why.

Several years later (I must have been sixteen or seventeen by this point) my mother is explaining to me about this diamond and pearl ring that she was supposed to have given to me that belonged to her, and to her mother, etc, etc, but that it was stolen when I was still a baby and while she was pretty sure she knew who did it, she couldn't prove it, and it just didn't do well to accuse people of things like that.

And suddenly, everything added up. "It was my babysitter," I said, "wasn't it? Jeanie something-or-other. With the brown curly hair and freckles?" My mother stared at me.

"How did you know that?"

"I didn't, at the time. I just knew something was wrong. But it makes sense, doesn't it?"

Cooperative Blogging time, children...

I know most of my friends don't usually comment "in blog" on my blog... I usually get the "oh, I'm sorry"'s and the "Ha! that was funny"s in Aims or Irc...

But help me out a little here...

About ten years ago or so, I started noticing the "Random acts of kindness" bumper stickers everywhere... the novel and utterly unrealistic idea of doing something nice for someone that you'll never know who they are... I did it for a while - dropping an extra dime in the snack machine or something equally trivial. It later occurred to me that if I saved up those dimes, I could do one charity or one person a lot of good, instead of doing a bunch of people next to no good.

I think the same thought occurred to most of the rest of the universe as well, since I have neither run into the bumper sticker, nor a "random" kindness in a long time.

That is, however, almost exactly not what I wanted to tell you about...

Have you ever done something completely unkind to someone you didn't know?

I mean, we're all familiar with the Tylenol Murders, right? I've always found that to be oddly terrifying and fascinating at the same time. Why in god's name kill people that you know nothing about? I mean, I can sort of vaguely understand killing someone who's wronged you - I often feel this urge to strangle people. We don't indulge it, under normal circumstances, and that's called "society." But they're always specific people. That stupid bitch who ran me off the road the other day because she was talking on her cell-phone... the cashier at the grocery store who rang up the same TV dinner three times and then got all in my face when I protested paying for the same item three times... you know, specific people.

My freshman year of college, I actually spent a lot of time in Richmond with my boyfriend and some of our "friends" from high school. (Well, my friends from high school and his friends from... whatever. My boyfriend at the time was a good four years older than I was and I'm not sure why all our friends were the same peer group.)

Anyway, one weekend when I was up there, M called and said he'd gotten two flat tires and could we come pick him up and give him a hand. Sure, why not? Me and the boyfriend drove out to the Shockoe Bottom area of Richmond... M had already put the spare on the car, but the other tire was still flat. And he had very limited funding. So did I. So did the boyfriend. And M really needed his car, otherwise he couldn't get to work and therefore earn any money to do anything...

So we decided to... well, to appropriate someone else's tire. We drove around until we found another car of the same make and model and jacked it up, stole a tire off it and replaced it with M's flat. I insisted on that much, since M wanted to just put the other car down, sans tire at all.

That's the meanest thing I ever did to someone I've never seen... So... confess... what's the meanest thing you ever did to someone you don't know?