Occasionally, Daughter calls my cell as she’s walking to the subway on her way home from work. She’s a head teacher of early education for special needs children, and she’ll already be laughing as she tells me something hilarious one of her kids said. I know she adores her students and her work, so it’s a pleasure to hear the joy in her voice as she repeats these very amusing incidents, none of which I can write about here due to HIPAA laws or the Patriot Act or whatever requires modern life to be protected to the point of being covert. Which is one of the things that inspires caustic writers to blog anonymously.
Being an unidentified friend of a caustic writer, though, puts you out in open territory, so I regularly share anecdotes passed on by my pals. A great friend of mine, who we’ll call Mrs. B, teaches ESL in the public school system and some of her stories slay me. She often wears a blazer in the classroom and adorns it with a pretty pin on the lapel. One day, a shy eleven-year-old girl from a country very far away was so taken with the lovely pins her teacher always wore that she said, “Oh, Mrs. B, I love your penis. I love all your penis.”
My friend said the trick is to keep a straight face in a situation like this because the more hilarious the misstatement, the higher the embarrassment quotient for the student. This one was off the chart considering all the eleven-year-old boys in the room from countries maybe not so far away who were writhing in their seats with hysterical merriment. Mrs. B thanked the complimenting student by saying, “I’m so glad you like my pins, dear,” as the boys from Brazil fell apart.
Another friend, the mother of three sons, related this tale of an average dinnertime at her house when the boys were very young and phone calls were discouraged at meals. One evening when the phone rang, my friend nodded at her youngest, the son with the smart mouth, to go answer it. The family heard the six-year-old tell the caller, “Yes, she is, but we’re having dinner so can she call you back?”
When he returned to the table, my friend asked him who was on the phone. “Your boyfriend,” he deadpanned. As his brothers giggled into their napkins, my friend looked over at her husband. He already knew which of his sons was the wiseass, so he just snorted while his wife made a mental note to torture the kid privately.
One incident my children still taunt me with came at the end of a hectic day. Daughter was five and Son was half that, with his language skills just developing. They were playing in their room, which shared a common wall with the kitchen where I was trying to prepare dinner. Son was repeatedly throwing a soccer ball against their side of the wall, causing the hanging pot rack on the kitchen side to shake precariously, along with my nerves. After several bounces I yelled for him to cut it out. A brief pause was followed by more bounces, followed by me yelling louder that he’d be sorry if he kept it up.
When the soccer ball hit the wall yet again, I lost it. I slammed my hands on the counter and screamed, “If you bounce that ball one more time I’m going to shove it down your throat!”
First there was dead silence, then Son’s disbelieving little voice as he looked from the soccer ball to his sister.
SON’S LITTLE VOICE: Can’t. Too big.
DAUGHTER’S LITTLE VOICE: (see title)
We’re Talking City here with Daughter’s Featured Fotos
rush
shrine
splintered (Feature INC)
wild life (DCKT Gallery)