There were two little boys, probably 5 or 6 years old, playing Lord of the Slide at the park this afternoon. They had perched themselves at the top of the slide, and they wouldn’t budge, thus rendering the slide inoperable. But that’s not the point.

When Poppy and I walked by the slide on our way in, one of the boys shouted, “Hey! I seen you before! You was here yesterday!” He was wrong, and not just grammatically, so I said, “That must have been someone else. We weren’t here yesterday.”

Later, when Poppy was waiting patiently for a turn at the slide, another, smaller boy wandered over. The Lord of the Slide looked at the boy, then looked at me and asked, “Does they has a name?”

And so I handed him a copy of “The Elements of Style” and the schedule for the nearest Toastmasters meeting, and we left.

Not really.

I told him I was sure the little boy had a name, and that he should ask the little boy. Then I asked him to move so Poppy could slide. He did, but only after his mother yelled at him from the trail outside the playground, where she had taken the boy’s sister to pee behind a tree.

Really.