“Cry baby cry, wipe your winking eye, no baby no, please don’t let it show!”
That was the song that three girls and a boy — who they enlisted to punch me in the stomach — sang over and over again as they clapped and paraded in a circle around me as I wept, my head down on the table, my arms covering my head. The year was 1972 and I was in Mr. Fagan’s second-grade class at Camp Allen Elementary school in Norfolk, Va.
That was 40 years ago and, while I remember hardly anything else about that class, I remember that incident like it was yesterday. Memories of school bullying have a way of sticking with you.