Kick Me by Paul Feig Page B

all the selected items from his past.
    On most occasions I’d only get far enough in to find old homemovie equipment and bags of forgotten sweaters and shoes. Once I came across an old tool kit sitting under some of the bags. The beat-up metal case contained ancient power and hand tools that even Ethan Allen would have rejected as being too clunky and antiquated. I took out an old drill and something that looked like a pointy egg beater and started to pretend they were deadly weapons that only I had the power to control. After a few minutes, I became convinced that my dad had memorized the exact way the tools had been laid into the box and spent the next half hour in a panic, trying to rearrange them back inside the case so that their disruption could pass the scrutiny of my father’s probing eyes. Looking back, I’m sure my father hadn’t thought about those tools in years and wouldn’t have known I had disturbed them if I had put a note inside the box that read “I swear I didn’t touch your tools.” But, like any good intrigue worth its salt, paranoia was an essential part of espionage.
    And, unfortunately, the one time I erased paranoia from the equation was the time I almost got my family into big trouble.
    One day when I was eight, while scavenging in my father’s closet, I made a strange and exciting discovery after making it all the way to the very back and bottom bag. I had dreamed of going in this far for a year now but had never had the nerve. However, having earlier that day won the first and only game of tetherball I would ever win in my life (because I had challenged a right-handed kid whose right arm was in a cast—a kid I
still
almost ended up losing to), I found the courage to boldly go where I hadn’t gone before. What I ended up finding as I dug into the decaying bag was my father’s stash of memorabilia he had collected during his time as a GI in Europe during World War II. My dad would occasionally tell me stories about how his division had landed at Normandy, albeit on the day
after
D Day, but I found this to be quite impressive and always told my friends that my father was a war hero. And now I found myself quite excited that I was finally getting some tangible proof. I opened the musty-smelling grocery bag and looked inside. On top were some old army clothes, including a shirt that had my dad’s name written over the breast pocket. Sticking up along the side of the bag was a green handle. I pulled it out carefully and found that it was a folding army shovel. I was impressed that these were things that actually belonged to my father during World War II. But since he sold both old army clothes and folding shovels in his store, I realized that I’d have to dig deeper in the bag if I wanted to find something really good. I pulled out an old boot and another pair of green army pants. And then I uncovered two items that blew my eight-year-old mind.
    I reached in and pulled out a long, sleek-looking dagger in a sheath. I stared at the knife in disbelief. It didn’t look like something an American soldier would carry. Knowing nothing about military history, I deduced from the old war movies I had seen my dad watching on TV that this was a knife that had belonged to somebody important and scary in the war. I slid the dagger out of its sheath. The blade was about a foot long and thin and looked practically new. I lightly touched the edge and realized it was sharp enough to cut me if I so much as put my fingers on it with any sort of additional pressure. The handle was covered with a thin layer of leather and between the blade and the handle was a medallion with a strange-looking eagle on it. I was immediately in awe and terrified of the dagger. I slowly swung it around, trying to act in a way that I thought someone with a knife like this might act during a war. But I was soon struck with an image of me accidentally dropping the knife and cutting my leg off. And so I quickly put the knife back in