WHENEVER SOMEONE TELLS YOU they want to have a little talk, you can be sure they mean a big one.
There’s something in human nature, I’m beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It’s like looking—or talking—through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken.
Has no one ever noticed this but me? If not, then I’m happy to take the credit for being the first to point it out.
Perhaps only J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, saw through dimly to the truth: that by the time we are old enough to protest such rotten injustice, we have already forgotten it.