I don't know why this came into my head this morning, but I was letting my mind wander.... OK - that's a lie - I don't give it permission to wander - my mind is the jack-booted dictator of wandering - so let me rephrase:  my mind took me wandering.  One of the places it took me was to some occurances that culminated some 30 years ago, during my first weeks of graduate school. 

 The story begins in the first grade.  I was being tormented by a bully.  His name was Patrick.  I remember his last name too, but I'm leaving that out to protect the guilty.   Patrick was pretty-much your run-of-the-mill school yard bully.  He was large, surly and a couple of years older than me.  He had red hair and  light eyes.  I mention that last bit only because I was jolted when watching the movie "A Christmas Story" by the physical similarities between Patrick and Scott Farcus.   Anyway, I digress...

Patrick tormented me almost daily by cornering me in a hallway away from adult eyes and threatening that he was going to bring a saw to school to saw my arms off.  I was not an especially stupid kid.  I knew that this was unlikely, but still, the penalty for being wrong was high, so it was still kind of frightening.  He even went so far as to bring a pocket knife with a saw blade to school one day, just so he could open it and show it to me while he had me cornered.   His stooge held me while Patrick brandished the knife.  I was terrified.  Fortunately for me, my mom gave me some good tips on how to shed a bully, which worked, so my torment at Patrick's hands only lasted a couple of weeks.  He moved away the next year.  But I sure did remember it.  And him.

 Fast-forward to 1980.  I had just started grad school - I was maybe a month in.  I was doing my very first laboratory rotation - a temporary stay in a lab where a student gets a chance to try out the kind of work going on there.  I didn't recognize him at first.  He was a grad student from a different department working in the same lab.  He was a couple of years older than me.  He had red hair hair and light eyes, and was named Pat.  He was actually pretty nice to me.  We didn't actually become friends, but we were friendly.  He helped me out learning some new things, and I lent him a pair of hands  (well, the use of them - they stayed attached to my arms ;-) from time to time.  After a couple of weeks, it began to dawn on me.  Could it be?  Nawwww, it couldn't.  Could it? 

 So I started slipping the odd question into conversations.  Where did he grow up?   Really?  Did he go to so and so school?  (I used the name of the nearby elementary school to throw him off the idea that I might know him).  After a week or two of this, I was certain - it was Patrick the bully himself!  Small world. 

Pat had no idea I knew him from elementary school, or remembered his bullying ways (which to his credit, he seemed to have outgrown).  So he was a sitting duck.  I could take me revenge in any of a million ways that he would never be able to trace to me.  I thought about it.  I could ruin his experiments in ways that he would never detect - he would just put in weeks of work and they wouldn't turn out for some reason.  I could take a more direct approach and confront him.  But in the end, I just decided to let it go. 

I knew who he was, and that was enough.