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I attended a picnic for Itawamba Attendance Center's kindergarten classes last week, snapping pictures of restless youngsters who were supposed to be sitting and eating lunch but were pretty much doing anything but. It was everything you would imagine it to be: little kids laughing and screaming and jumping around. Admittedly, when I show up to such events I exacerbate the situation, turning up the heat until the water boils out of control. There's just something so fun about little kids and the way they rattle incessantly about anything and everything. It's like looking in a mirror. I can't help but encourage that kind of behavior.

Anyway, so I'm yapping with these kids about Iron Man and Doritos and whether or not any of them like salt and vinegar potato chips, which I have now been informed are “gross,” and there's this one little boy who's stockpiling animal crackers. He beckons for me with a single finger.

“Hey. Look at all my crackers.”

“Whoa...where did you get all those?” I like to act genuinely amazed as it tends to make kids really excitable.

“From my friends. They gave them to me.”

“Awesome,” I said, earnestly. There's something to be learned from kids. As cliché as it sounds, they have an innocence that simply falls away with age, as if each year chinks a little piece off until there's nothing left. Seeing a kid so full of excitement for simple things like a collection of animal crackers donated by his classmates made me smile.

Even as I stood there, another classmate — a young girls with wispy blonde hair — approached with her pack of animal crackers in hand. She held these out to the little boy.

“Do you want my pack, too,” she asked, extending them as far as her little arm could reach.

“Yeah,” the boy practically shouted, reaching out to grab the pack. She snatched it back.

“Well, you can't have them.” Her tone suggested offense, as if he shouldn't have agreed to take them despite her offer. She stormed away, back to her seat on the grass, opened her animal crackers and enjoyed them one at a time.

It was the most ruthless thing I've ever seen.