The Person I'm Next To Is A Berserk Falcon.

I'm next to this woman. She is a mother, and pretty much looks like one too. She is just over 5 feet and isn't a huge lady, but is gently rotund. This isn't just me being polite, it is really the best way to describe her body mass. She has on a sweatshirt with what is presumably a school mascot on it. It is a cartoon bird, a raptor of some variety, who has broad unbird-like shoulders, wings curled into clenched fists, and looks for all the world like he is going to jump off her shirt and snap my neck.
I've always wondered about upset looking mascots. Are they angry because their team doesn't win much? Or maybe it is this aviary rage that fuels the school's march to victory. In this I'll just assume her kid must go to Berserk Falcon Elementary or something. Her shirt is a digression, her kid is the point.
She is telling a story about her kid. Her kid is wonderful, or at least has done something wonderful. To me that is, not to her. Apparently her 2nd grader was sick recently. Not fever sick, mind you, vomit sick. This illness didn't make itself known till the little germ factory was already tucked away in a pile of other kids spreading his disease through the classroom. In unthoughtful nauseous kid fashion, he waits until he is throwing up over the a few desks to share his symptoms. So after coating some surfaces with half digested school lunch his mother is called to pick him up.
She takes him home, cleans him, changes his clothes and asks him how he is and what happened exactly. The kid gives his report; my tummy hurt, I threw up, the janitor made me clean it up with a bucket and sponge. Steps one and two check out with doctor mom, step three causes her some consternation. According to the vomiteer’s story some lazy or finicky janitor made her child clean up his own vomit. Whether out of squeamishness, or to discipline the kid against future stomach flues is unresolved in the 2nd grader’s report.
Mom turns into the berserk falcon which now emblazons her shirt. With burning feathered rage she dials the school number and circles impatiently on hold. When the principle picks up she stoops, diving at mind numbing speeds into a diatribe of his custodial staff that will make him rue the day he ever posted the opening on Monster.com. The principle tucks his tail and offers his pride to this raging bird god and promises to transfer the verbal rending he has received to the offending janitor himself. The mother wheels back to her nest clutching in her talons a prize for her young.
She tells her child it is okay now, and that the janitor was wrong and that he has been punished. Her child tells her that he was kidding.
He lied. This marvelous youth lied, a beautiful, delightful, perfectly timed lie. Caught in a frenzy of maternal instinct this woman failed to debate the unlikely story. Now she runs to the telephone scrambling to stop the principle, and apologize. She fails. The secretary pages the principle urgently but it is too late. The poor janitor is, even as the mother waits nervously on the line, receiving an unwarranted and brutal scolding from his boss. The mother is officially warranted in being brutally mortified. Wonderful, so wonderful, it is possible I now love her child more than she does.
I might have run with that berserk falcon metaphor too long, sorry.

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