When I was 6 my youngest sibling, the only boy and aged 2, received a toolbox for Christmas.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my dolls and clothes and perhaps an “easy bake” oven but I was obsessed with that toolbox. It had a hammer with a wooden shaft and a bright blue head. There was a little craft table that held cutouts of circles and triangles and squares. The object was to take the color coded blocks and fit them into their proper mates and hammer like hell until they sat perfectly. It was a hands-on jigsaw puzzle for the future male engineers of the world.

In the guise of a good big sister entertaining her baby brother, we played carpenter together.

Valiantly I would hammer a circle into a square with all my heart, twisting and turning the block to make it fit, but even at that young age I real-eyesd you couldn’t fit a circle into a square without bludgeoning it to death. Mine never fit until at least the fourth try, when I finally got the idea to try a circle with a circle, a square with a square.

I had just learned the art of futilely manipulating a person, place or thing, pretending I was helping them in order to get what I secretly wanted.

I guess I’m slow, because it has just come to me that I still have that bright blue hammer and no matter how hard I hit with it, a circle will NOT fit into a square.

You can’t live your today with yesterday’s hammer, no matter how seductively it’s painted.