You're A Lifesaver

At our motel, we had a swimming pool with two life preservers. These were "for emergency use only," as a stern sign warned, but guests would take them down and engage in all manner of horseplay. If I or my mom saw it, we'd march out there with fingers a-wag. "It was for their own safety," we would tell them, my mom convincingly and I obnoxiously (I was a kid ordering people around!), and they would sadly hang the life preservers back on the wall. But in over a decade, I never once saw someone reach for a life preserver in an emergency and have it not be there because it was being enjoyed. There may be a moral here about not putting off happiness just because you're worried about something bad that may never occur, but I think a bigger lesson is this: If you give a child of nine the power to reprimand adults, he will grow up full of himself.