From One Anachronism to Another

by Lucillia

"Have you never dipped little Suzy's curls in ink?" is a rather unusual question to ask three centuries after the invention of the ball-point pen, and more than two after just about everything went paperless but, James Kirk had asked it. The question that remains is how did something like that end up on the list of pranks that the Captain of the Enterprise had pulled in his youth?

One of the reasons James Kirk got along with aliens as well as he did was probably because his own upbringing had been so unusual when compared to those of the vast majority of his peers, making him the odd one out even amongst his own kind. Because his experiences had been entirely normal to him and those exceedingly few who shared them with him at the time, he often didn't realize that any questions he asked based on those experiences were unusual until the person he asked looked at him in utter bewilderment.

Spock's raised eyebrow at the list of pranks he'd pulled during his youth had clued him into the fact that he'd yet again started speaking of things that almost nobody but him and a select few others who'd likely never sail the stars understood.

His parents' desire for him to understand his Amish neighbors who rented and farmed most of the land of the farm where he'd spent the vast majority of his childhood had likely been a major factor in his ability to survive on Tarsus IV but, that had not been his parents' or anyone else's intention when his parents had sent him and Sam before him to the small Amish school that was located nearby for the early years of their education. It had been there that he had learned a number of highly anachronistic pranks that had more often than not left their victims blinking in confusion as their brains tried to process what had just happened.

He had been six when he had dipped one of little Suzy's pigtails in ink.

Back then, he had been attending classes in a small wooden schoolhouse that would have likely excited and fueled the imaginations of many of the local children had they the opportunity to attend for a while. For him and the others who shared classes with him however, it was just school and what it engendered was quite the opposite. For him the school inspired what school did for many children, and that was boredom.

Sitting there in that small wooden building filled with its rows and rows of antique wooden desks that called to mind an earlier age, a much simpler time when people couldn't even imagine sailing amongst the stars in ships that could warp their way to places that would take thousands of years to reach through more conventional means, James Tiberius Kirk who did not realize how privileged he was was bored. Being bored, he had cast his eyes and mind about searching for something to alleviate that boredom, something other than the lesson in penmanship that was sitting in front of him.

It was then that he noticed exactly how long Susan Michaelson's hair was. Suzy Michaelson who had been sitting in front of him for the past year, Suzy Michaelson whose long curly red hair had been tied back into a pair of exceedingly long pigtails. A pair of long pigtails that just might reach the inkwell that was set in his desk, the inkwell that had been filled with ink for this lesson. Reaching forward, he decided to test his theory.

Two seconds later, there was a loud squeal from Suzy who had felt her hair being tugged sharply backwards. A second after that, Suzy's dress was ruined when she stood up and the ink soaked ends of her hair swiped across the back of it. The culprit was rather swiftly caught and sent home for the rest of the day where he was given a number of menial tasks to complete by his rather irate mother.

Many years later, this became yet another example of one of those experiences that Kirk only shared with someone who'd died centuries before he was born, since none of his other classmates had dared follow his example after the punishment he received.