Teasing It Out
There isn't much sacred in my family. By that, I mean that practically anything anyone has ever done at any time in their life, ever, is fair game to bring up and use against them for a laugh. It's never done in a mean-spirited manner. I'm not saying that the butt of the current joke is always happy about it. It's just that they know their day will come. What goes around, comes around. I don't remember consciously making this a requirement that Wonder Woman had to meet before I married her, but she met it anyway. And how. Even my step-daughters who were both adults when I met them are also ruthless teasers of their saintly mother and their own offspring.
Today is our Elizabeth's birthday. In the text I sent her this morning, I related an entry from my journal. Five years ago, I answered a prompt for the daily entry. "Who is the funniest person you know?" My answer was "I’m going to say Elizabeth, followed closely by Jennifer. Lizzie has that understated absurdist sense of humor that I identify with. The time she explained that the older boys thought that Will and Aiden were going to McDonald's EVERY DAY because they found trash in the car ONE TIME is still one of the funniest observations I’ve ever heard a parent make about their kids. It was just her delivery and the believability of what she says."
My oldest daughter is not ashamed of one of her finest legalistic moments, eating cereal from a mixing bowl to get around my "one bowl rule." And my son is still the same sweet person, who once got mad at his sisters when they were children. the meanest thing he could think of to retaliate was to threaten to buy two boxes of Junior Mints and then refuse to share with them because that would sure as hell show them who was boss.
Jennifer, the youngest of all five of our kids, can be pretty scathing when it comes to recalling her Mom's finest moments. Wonder Woman often gets the short end of the stick when it comes to food at endurance events. She has celiacs and can't eat wheat, which rules out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pop tarts and other assorted sweets that race organizers offer. Jennifer loves to tell the story of her Mom yelling that she "Didn't want another fucking banana" once at a race having grown sick of that being the only thing she could eat at aid station after aid station.
The kids love to tease me for the times when I failed to rise to the manliness some occasions seem to have required. We had wiener dogs when the kids were in school, miniature ones. We were in front of the house with one of them this particular night when a massive Rottweiler entered the yard and began to menace our pooch. My son was there with me. Instead of dealing with either of the canines, for some reason, the only thing I could think to do was to begin yelling at my teenage boy "Get the dog! Get the dog!" I was frozen in place, unable to move, commanding a kid I outweighed by a hundred pounds to stare down a Rottweiler. It was not my finest moment.
He also mocks my one and only attempt to engage in his hobby of Japanese kendo fighting. It's conducted with bamboo swords. When I was a kid, and we did play sword fighting, we just tapped sticks together , which is what I thought he and I were going to do. When he announced that the bout was on, I was pretty nonchalant, ready to tap sticks. Not him. He took his kendo sword and proceeded to wail on my bare hands about 10 times in as many seconds. It was excruciating. I yelled, threw the sword down and told him that he was a jerk. But the part he likes to bring up was that I then called him a sadist for his joy in causing his old man so much pain. This was after the Rottweiler incident, so he might have just been paying me back for putting his life in danger.
Good opportunities for teasing never die. The first time I went with my wife to Asheville, we crossed the French Broad River going into town. She misread the sign and asked why they named it the French Bread River, and thus it has been named ever since, much to her chagrin. So, I'm warning you all right now. If we ever hang out, don't slip up because I will never let you forget it.
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