I am a bad man. When I was sixteen, I was riding my dirt bike down a country road near where I lived. I spied Sherry, a local girl about three years younger, about fifty yards ahead, walking in the same direction with a transistor radio plastered to one ear. (remember those?) She was dressed in her typical summer fashion: bare midriff, with her shirt tied in a knot in the front, and the customary skin-tight white shorts.

Sherry and I had an on-and-off relationship; I was too dumb to recognize hard-to-get flirting, and we often parted with biting insults of one sort of another.

The current scenario was Just Too Good To Pass By. Realizing that she was concentrating on the radio, I cut the engine on my dirt bike, and as I coasted past, reached out and smacked her on the rump.

I gave her a good one but hadn't taken into account that I was already going fifteen, twenty miles an hour. It popped like a firecracker; she jumped at least a foot, followed by a stream of swear words that would make a coal miner blush.

Interestingly, the next time we met and I of course refused to apologize, our relationship warmed - quite a bit. I'll leave it there. Ah, youth. Yes, fifty years ago, but I'm still a bad man.