OK, so here’s another thing I’m going to try not to do three times. See, I said every now and then I'd add another one. There’s a caveat with this one though. Once this particular cat is out of the bag, all bets are off. I don’t want to set the bar too high so I’m not going to say never. I mean, sometimes I do slip up, I am only human. So the caveat is that I’m talking about only the truly young here. So what am I talking about?
I’m trying really hard not to swear in front of the little kids.
I live south of Boston. I have family that lives north of Boston. To get from one place to the other, I have several options. I can go the long way mileage wise and ride around the City. Or I can take the short way and go through the city. Time wise, they are about the same. I like going through the city, it’s a more interesting drive. My wife HATES going through the city. She finds it scary. Well, she finds my driving scary in general. Add the traffic and confusion that is Boston to the drive and she’s just terrified. When I head toward Boston, she tenses up, closes her eyes and is just miserable until we punch through to the other side.
When the kids were little, I’m talking little little, preschool, kindergarten little, we had what I ‘ll just say was an incident. We’re heading onto the bridge in Charlestown. We’re almost out of the city, two more miles and we are home free. We are where Storrow Drive merges in to Rte 93. We are in the middle where the lanes merge together. I’m right beside some guy when he decides to merge into my lane. There’s no blinker, he doesn’t look over, he doesn’t speed up or slow down. He pays no attention to me at all. He just “merges”. I had to stand on the brakes to keep from smashing into him. Everything in the car went flying. Lisa who’s already tense starts screaming and I start yelling. I yell “WHAT AN A@#HOLE.” Lisa now starts yelling at me. I look at her and say “ME, I didn’t do anything, it was that A@#HOLE.” We exchange this pleasantry a couple more times. Lisa then looks at me and tells me to watch what I’m saying because the kids are in the car. I say OK, but the other guy is an A@#HOLE.
So, later the next week I came home from work to find Lisa laying in wait. She’s outside waiting for me as I pull into the yard. Oh, the second I see her, I can tell. She’s getting ready to pounce. Looks to all the world like she’s going to jump on me. So I’m cautious when I approach her, but I can’t think of anything I’ve done recently to be in trouble for. That look she’s shooting me can’t really be for me. Can it? As I approached, Lisa looked at me and asked, “Do you know what Caitlin said to me today, do you know what she called me?” Being a little slow on the uptake, I stupidly said “nooooooo???”. A smart man would already have been running. But I’ve never been accused of being too smart. I on the other hand followed this comment by asking “What did Caitlin say?”. Lisa looked at me with death in her eyes and responded “Caitlin called me a A@#HOLE.” At this point, Caitlin is only 4 or 5. I started to chuckle. Again, I’m not the sharpest knife in the draw. I should have known that Lisa didn’t see the humor in this. I should have known that I was only making matters worse. So I’m chuckling and I looked at Lisa and said “ahhhh, don’t worry about it, she doesn’t even know what it means.” I was then informed that Caitlin had used it correctly. Lisa was trying to “discipline” Cait. Caitlin didn’t want to be disciplined. Caitlin looked at her and explained that Lisa was being an A@#HOLE, and that she should stop being an A@#HOLE because, nobody likes an A@#HOLE. At this point, Lisa segued into punishing Cait. She tells me this whole story, and she’s mad. I’m still chuckling because, well it was kinda funny. Lisa didn’t think so. The lecture I got was unpleasant. I had no defense. My laughing didn’t help the cause. I spent several nights out of the big bed again.
Case closed, right? What’s another word for almost right, begins with W? WRONG!
Did you ever see the movie “The Cat’s Eye?” It’s actually three short films by Stephen King. One of the films is about a guy that has to walk round the top of a skyscraper on the outside ledge. As he’s walking around, the disgruntled husband of the woman he’s seeing is trying to knock him off. At one point the guy on the ledge slips and falls into the darkness. The husband starts cackling. All of a sudden out of the night all you can hear is “Youuuuuuu BASTARD!!!” A disembodied voice echoing from the blackness of night in pure defiance. The guy that had fallen, climbs back up onto the ledge and keeps walking. I don’t know why, but one of the guys in the office was struck by this scene and phrase. He thought it amusing. So everything started to somehow contain the phrase “youuuu Bast#$rd”. We started using it like punctuation. It kinda became the department catch phrase. Everything contained a “Bast$#d” in it somewhere. Apparently, I unknowingly took this phrase home with me. OK, maybe it was knowingly.
When Dan the Man was young, we spent an awful lot of time together. When I was around, he was just glued to me. We did everything together. We walked, talked, played games. You name it, wherever I was, Dan the Man wanted to be there too and he wanted to be doing whatever I was doing.. One day when he’s maybe four years old (Apparently, this is an impressionable age, who knew?) we’re out in the yard playing basketball. I have a significant advantage being as at this point I’m about 3 feet taller than him and have him be about 200 pounds. So we are playing 1 v 1. I beat him 15 to 13. (Score another victory for the old man, OLD GUYS RULE!!! hey, a wins a win) After my third straight victory we went into the house to take a break. Our attention is diverted to other things so our competition is suspended for the time being. Dan keeps bugging me to go back outside, but I’m on to other things. Eventually, Dan gets distracted doing some kid thing and I start puttering around. I went outside to get something, who knows what. On the way past the hoop, I grabbed the basketball, bounced it a couple of times, took one shot then went about my business.
About 5 seconds after I do this, Lisa comes stumbling out of the house. She’s killing herself laughing AND she’s trying to yell at me. I looked at her with great puzzlement and wonder. After she catches her breath she looked at me and said “You really have to watch what you say in front of Dan.” I asked what she was talking about. She started laughing again. After a second or two, she repeats her comment. Now I’m wondering what she’s talking about.
Seems Dangerous Dan the Man was busily playing on the floor with his is building blocks when he heard me start bouncing the ball. When he heard it, he jumped up, went running for the door and yelled “WHAT”S THAT BAST$#RD DOING?” Lisa stopped whatever it was that she was doing and asked him what he was doing. Dan looked at her and said “I HAVE TO SEE WHAT THAT BAST$#RD IS DOING”. Lisa asked, “What did you say?” Dan looked at her and said, “THAT BAST$#RD IS OUT THERE PLAYING, HE’S CHEATING, HE’S PLAYING WITHOUT ME.” This is when Lisa came outside for all intents and purposes, to yell at me except she can’t. She can’t because she’s in hystericks. Finally she just said “Look, be careful what you say in front of the kids, one of these times they going to say something in front of my mother then we’ll all be in trouble.”
So, there you go. I really try to keep myself in check, especially around the younguns. They are going to have to become fully versed in the fine art of profanity somewhere else. No more guidance from me. However, once they have come up to speed on their own, all bets are off. I mean after all, once they hit high school, the shock and awe factor is gone anyway. A few well placed swears sometime help make a point. Besides, this is when they started teaching me a few new words. You know what they say, turnabout is fair play.
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