Like most kids, I heard my share of lectures while I was growing up. My parents, teachers, priests, and my older sisters would tell me what to do and how to do it and when I screwed up, well then, I got a different kind of lecture about why I was so stupid.

Certain words from these lectures stay frozen in my mind no matter how many years have past. I’m going to bring them back in fictional anecdote I’ve written for this column. I’m sure you’ll recall many of them too. Perhaps you were the one saying these words or like me, you were on the other end of them.

So I’m coming down the stairs. I miss a step and tumble to the floor. I sit there rubbing the pain from my leg. Along comes my big brother who heard me crash.

“You should be more careful,” he said.

I looked up at him with a sharp pain stabbing my hip and I said. “Nah. It’s more fun to fall down the stairs and see what hurts after I hit the floor.”

“What did you do to make yourself fall?”

“I must have missed a step coming down.”

“What did you do that for? That was a stupid thing to do.”

“Says the big brother who hit the gas pedal instead of the brake and plowed into the car in front of him.”

“You’re always in a hurry,” he continued. “I tell you time and time again. You never listen to me.”

“Yes. You are the God of all knowing, the captain of common cense, the master of ‘I told you sos.’”

“Now why would you say that? What’s the matter with you?”

Apparently, everything is the matter with me and nothing is the matter with you. You wrote the book called ‘Trust Everything I Say.’ When I was little, you were the one who told me it’s a $50 fine if I stepped on a praying mantis and chocolate milk comes from brown cows. You said if someone turns a light on in the car while it’s moving, it would cause a wreck and kill everyone inside. When I opened an umbrella in the house you said I would have seven years of bad luck. You told me that when I walked on a sidewalk, if I stepped on a crack, I’d break mom’s back and if I stepped on a line, I’d break dad’s spine.”

“I didn’t really mean all that. I was just having fun.”

“I looked up to you, bro, but not anymore and I’m going to show you something that will change everything between you and me right now. Follow me.”

He followed me halfway back up the stairs and I turned around and pushed him. He fell down the stairs to the floor below.

“What did you do that for?” he asked, glaring up at me and rubbing his legs.

“Because now I’m no longer looking up at you. I’m looking down at you and the question I’m asking you is the same one you always ask me. ‘What did you do that for.?’”

“Do what?”

“Follow me up the stairs.”

“I trusted you. You were going to show me something.”

“Exactly. You see how the tables have turned? I trusted everything you told me when I looked up to you as my big brother.

“You could have made your point in a different way, not by pushing me down the stairs. You know what you should have done? Taken me to the kitchen table and we could have had this talk.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “You should be more careful about coming up the stairs behind me. What did you do that for? What’s the matter with you? That was a stupid thing to do. You know what you should have done? You should have asked me where we were going when I told you to follow me. You should have known I might push you down the stairs. And now - I told you so.”

“OK, I understand what you’re getting at. Let’s just let all this go. How about we shoot some hoops outside and the loser buys a pizza at Nick’s?”

“We can’t,” I said. “Yesterday, I left the basketball in the driveway and I guess Mom didn’t see it when she backed out of the garage and she drove right over it.”

“Are you kidding me?” He shouted. “What did you do that for? That was a stupid thing to do. What’s the matter with you? That was an official NBA basketball. You know what you should have done? You should have put the ball back in the garage when you were done with it. You must have been in a hurry to do something else again. You have to be more careful. You never listen to me.”

We glared at each other for a long silent moment and then broke out into roars of laughter.

“Let’s go get that pizza,” he said. “I’m buying.”

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.