Out of the blue I remembered the kids’ assistant karate teacher, who was more into sword-fighting than karate, but apparently parents are less willing to pay for instruction in that. During a break, he presented me with a thought puzzle: You are in a fight, and a knife is drawn; what do you do?

Well, let me just tell you how much I hate questions like this from strangers. My brain turns into blue Icee slush. I am being tested, I am on the spot, I did not know there would be a test; this differs from my stress dreams only in that my stress dreams are more about not being able to find the classroom in which the test will be given, and being increasingly late for the test.

Coming up with The Correct Answer is more important to me than anything else in this life, and that is a normal thing to feel, especially for a person more inclined than the average person to freeze when asked an unexpected question. I came up with, “….Uh. I’d. Run away?” He said, “Ah!” So pleased, so very “Ah, young grasshopper!” even though he was probably fifteen years younger than me; “And why did you assume the other person had the knife?” Ho ho HO! It was a GOTCHA. A set-up. A trap. I was SUPPOSED to fall into that trap, and he WANTED me to fall into that trap, and he would have been DISAPPOINTED if I had NOT fallen into the trap—and yet I have spent over a dozen years blushing and cringing for falling into that trap.

Later, I thought: why didn’t I say “Um. Because I don’t, um. Carry a fighting knife? Or have fights. So. Like. If I were in an physical altercation, and a knife were drawn, that would be an altercation in which I would not draw a knife, because I would not have one? Or know how to use it in a fight? That’s why I RIGHTLY assumed it was the other person who had one, in this hypothetical scenario?”

Or why didn’t I say, “You are not correctly imagining the typical situations in which a woman finds herself in an altercation where a knife is drawn.”

Instead I listened to our young fellow explain to me how important it was to know how to defend yourself with a sword.