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Kids Say the Darnedest Things |
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Daisy Maudine, I told him, referring to my father's mother. My son wrinkled his nose. "What kind of name is that?" he asked. "It's the kind of name people used to have back when my grandmother was a girl. There weren't any Brittanys or Taras," I said. "Maudine was a perfectly acceptable name." He shook his head as he wrote and was even less impressed when I told him his great-grandfather's name: Rube Burr. "Rube? Rube Burr?" Convinced our family's from outer space, he said the name again, only this time it came out all one word: Rubber. Like in the tongue-twister, "rubber baby bumpers." "No. It's two words, one name. Rube Burr." No one has names like that. "Your relatives do," I told him. "And Rube Burr's brother was named Bluford Griffin. Good thing I'm not into naming kids after their ancestors, isn't it?" His eyes widened at the thought he could have been a little Bluford. His father contributed a great-grandparent bearing the first name of Smith into the mix and another named Edgar and, suddenly, my child was fond of his own name. He barraged me with more questions for his report. Yes, I have an occasional glass of wine with dinner. And yes, again, I did smoke, but I gave it up years ago, I told him. He clucked his tongue and marked something on the form. The rest of the questions were pretty simple. I denied being a carrier for typhoid or malaria, and could advise, with a clear conscious, that I'd never had bubonic plague, rickets or scurvy. My son scribbled on the form, then moved on to the accident questions. "I know about dad's accidents, but have you ever had any?" he asked. "What kind?" "You know, the kind where you break bones, or get your head chopped off," he said. "I assured him that I was in one piece. The only time I've ever had a broken bone was when I was about nine years old and my sister and I were on a teeter-totter (also known as a seesaw). She was at the bottom and I was on the top and Elaine had the sudden urge to jump off. My toes were under the teeter-totter and I landed on them and fractured a couple. Other than that and a couple of less-than-graceful tumbles onto the street in the 70s while wearing wooden platform shoes, I was pretty much intact. He seemed satisfied and told me he didn't need any more help. After all, he'd chronicled his father's injuries by listening to us joke over the years. And there was plenty to joke about. As a retired police officer and part-time carpenter, my spouse has taken a few tumbles and had a few close encounters of the accident kind. And even after all that, he's still in one piece. But I had not reckoned on the old "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" rule. The kind where a kid hears grown-up discussions not meant for his ears and filters them through the brain of a child. To say that he'd interpreted his father's "accident" history in a colorful – and quite fictitious manner – was an understatement. It read this like:: "My dad was shot in the leg, fell through a window and cut his arm off and had to have part of his leg sewed onto his hand to fix it, and sank two out of the three boats he was in, and crashed his car and nearly cut off his thumb with a saw." |
