DelBloggolo: THINGS SHE LEARNED ON HER FATHER’S KNEE

Friday, May 15, 2015

THINGS SHE LEARNED ON HER FATHER’S KNEE

I never had luck with women when I was young:

Me – Can I buy you a drink?

Woman – I think I’d rather have the money.

They say that children are impressionable, that they pickup everything at an early age. Everything that is except what you want them to learn or in other words what you don’t necessarily want them to learn.

Now when #1 Son was about 2 years of age, he would listen to me when I worked around the house, hammering my thumb to the wood or stripping a screw that wouldn’t move or some jackass driver who cut me off. I would often vocalize in a vulgar manner: “Son of a bitch!” which of course I learned from my dad.

Giving the raspberry

One Sunday when we went to Mass, #1 son picked up the phrase which was handed down for generations and sought to modernize it, eliminating all the words but the most important one: “Bitch”. This earned me poor marks on both my permanent records for father and husband, as I got chewed out once we reached the car.

He would suddenly say: “Bitch” and I was at first aghast then tried to cover-up as if I was a politician. If you notice I didn’t have to say; “dishonest” since using it in the same sentence with politician is a redundancy. No matter how hard I tried to get him to stop, he kept repeating it. “Bitch”. It didn’t help that a bunch of kids caught onto the fact that he was saying it and laughed. This made him want to say it more. And so he did.

Fast-forward 40 years to Burbank Bob Hope Airport, and there he is walking his little girl, my granddaughter: Darby Shea. Now Miss Shea has not learned to curse at a tender age, mainly because #1 Son hires people to do all the work around the house, but she did pay attention to his instructions on how to give people the raspberries and still be cute. The plane they were waiting for to fly to Maine was being delayed, so he decided to take Miss Darby for a walk, up and down the long corridor to Jet Blue, at least a ¼ mile trek, which she handled admirably, with one proviso: giving the raspberries to people while she waved at them, something #1 Son taught her rather well. This of course amused all those who got theirs from this little cutie-pie, encouraging her to go beyond the call of duty, just like her daddy!