What I heard is not what they meant

There are known to be stories of kids overhearing things that they shouldn’t from their parental figures. Such accounts vary from sad, to hilarious in their misinterpretations, to all spots in between.

Some of the more adventurous fictions always led to a kid running off on an exploratory vacation that is always more temporary than it started out intending. If there was ever a moment in my recall that could be the seed for one of those, (given a normal dose of dramatic exaggeration), it would be that one morning or so, sometime before I had settled my rivalry with the size of a feedsack, when I overheard my folks say something about sending me to fencing classes.

Now, just to make it clear, if there’s a job that you don’t need a lot of education or seniority to get assigned; a job that you might could be known as particularly good at, but have never heard a story about anyone being so incompetent as to need some sort of formal instruction — that job is fencing.

What I heard sounded a lot like some sort of just that. Fencing classes? To need that class makes an argument against one’s abilities or implies that you’ll be doing more of it than anyone else. Neither of which was something that even my younger brain wanted to hear.

Knowing what I know now, and learned right around that time, thank goodness — is that strangely enough (completely surprising to kid-me), some cool things are called the same word as something I didn’t think much of at all.

That was the day this ag-kid came to understand the term “fencing” better — after a little panic due to the ag-induced, skewed-prioritization of the meaning of the word. It’s an odd day when we learn that it sometimes means something fun.

A fencing class is still something that I’m hoping to take someday, and would be more than a little excited about, given that it’s referring to a particular brand of sword-fighting, instead of what I originally thought.

Audra Brown is a master of fencing, both single-wire, multi-wire, twisted, slick, hot, cold, old, quick, and barbed. Contact her at:

[email protected]