If my memory serves ime icorrectly, it was the spring of 1984. I was sitting in my second grade classroom listening to the teacher, Ms. Tanona, chatter on about whatever. To be honest, I wasn't paying attention. I was too excited about the evening ahead of me: I was attending a Bruins game with a few of my friends.

The bell finally rang. My friends and I spoke the whole way home about the plans. We were especially enthusiastic since it was our first Bruins game.

Chris's father drove, and on the way we stopped for dinner. Our order taker made a mistake and gave us three extra hamburgers. Even though I was quite full, I could not resist eating one of the extra burgers.

Immediately after dinner, Chris's dad asked us to wait outside while he made a telephone call from his car phone. While we were lingering outside, we observed a fight between the passengers of two cars near the drive-through lane. The driver of one car was yelling at the other driver to move his car because it was blocking the entrance to the drive-through (or something to that effect). After the drivers of both cars exchanged curses, the obstructing car moved, allowing the other to enter. But that driver yelled something at the other driver, unaware that the car had already left the parking lot. When the driver finished speaking, for some moronic reason, I thought it would be appropriate to yell something back. I felt the gentleman in the car who had left had been treated unfairly and it was my duty to say something on his behalf since he was not present to defend himself. It should have occurred to me that the gentleman I intended to criticize was not at all concerned with fairness. After a moment of considering what to say, I yelled out, "You just said that to thin air." Immediately, a door slammed and out walked this horrendous-looking beast of a man, with a scar on his right cheek and a black eye. He screamed at the top of his lungs, "Which one of you little jerks said that?" I was petrified. I stood there like a statue. The other two pointed at me. At that moment the man strolled over to me and lifted me up by the collar of my shirt so I looked directly into the black eye.

"Why don't you say that right to my face, you little jerk," said the man. As he spoke, my nose was filled with the stench of cigarettes and beer. The man was obviously intoxicated and I myself must have overdosed on dinner to have said what I did. I came extremely close to throwing up, but I managed not to, since I knew there would be dire consequences if I did. After the man spoke that one sentence and threatened to "beat the living crap" out of me, he dropped me to the ground and walked back to his car.

The Bruins won that night in overtime. It was a fabulous game. There was a fight between all of the players which lasted a good thirty minutes. Even with all of the excitement, we could not get the man out of our minds. We were afraid that he would hunt us down at the game and cause us a good amount of physical damage. We actually believed the man's car was following us on our way home, but he was only doing this in our minds. n