As a tall nine year old, wearing hand-me tailored plaid skirts and embroidered yoked dresses from my more tasteful cousins, people routinely guessed that I was in high school.

The shocker came when I opened my mouth to speak and sounded like the third-grader that I was. What made it worse was when they decided that I was either really stupid, or really smart — and some concluded that I was trying to pull one over on them no matter what I said.

I learned to keep quiet and observe. Fly low under any radar, even below some invisible limbo stick of assumptions held by friends and relatives at a party.

A+ in the school of life. Though I imagine there must be a better curriculum.