Excerpts From Life
Since my last business trip was going to be so l-o-n-g, I decided to bring along my little darlings. Although the first two days of a trip by myself tend to be blissful, what with reading uninterrupted and taking nice warm bubble baths and painting my nails and all, by the third day I start to get kind of sad, and by the fourth I feel sick to my stomach from wife and baby and little chunky boy withdrawal.
So I loaded up the whole fam damily on an airplane and schlepped them cross country. What fun we had. Sure, there was the inappropriate screaming and inopportune pants-pooping, but my doctor has prescribed a sedative that he promises will help me control myself a little better next time. Some tidbits from our journey:
Day One
Me: "Caleb, what would you like to eat for breakfast?"
Caleb: "Uh, chicken salad."
Me: "How about some yogurt?"
Caleb: "Nope. Chicken salad."
Me: "Sweety, I don't have any chicken salad. How about a banana?"
Caleb: "No, I want chicken salad."
Me: "Here, eat some cereal."
Caleb: "No, I want..."
Me: (Making a sound much like Dr. Evil to his son in the first Austin Powers movie) "Cht."
Caleb: "...chicken..."
Me: "Cht."
Caleb: "...saladdddd..."
Me: "Cccchhhhhhhhhtttttt."
Hours later:
Me: "Caleb, what would you like for lunch?"
Caleb: "Chicken salad."
Me: "How about peanut butter and jelly?"
Caleb: "Nope. Chicken salad."
Repeat morning scene. Repeat again for dinner. Chicken salad. Chicken salad. Chicken freaking salad.
Day Two
Me: "Caleb, guess what I have for you!"
Caleb: "For you!"
Me: "Yummy chicken salad!"
Silence.
Me: "Want a bite?"
Caleb: "Nope, I want macanoneys (translation: macaroni)."
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While driving through godless heathen country (the D.C. metro area) on Sunday morning, we pass numerous people jogging and/or going to the local version of church: Starbucks. I threaten to do what my grandfather used to do, which was to roll down his window and shout "Y'all ought to be in church!"
For some reason just the mention of this mortifies my wife. We stop at a streetlight, and a man and woman jog past. The woman is talking rapidly.
Me: "She sure has got a lot to say."
Wife: "Only a woman would talk and run at the same time."
We drive in silence for a moment.
Me: "Sometimes I forget how cool you are."
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In a moment of married couple serendipity, while discussing the rudeness of city folk, my wife and I simultaneously declare that said rudeness in Washington, D.C. is largely confined to white men. Upon further reflection we narrow this class of rude people to white men in business suits. To be sure, there are plenty of courteous white men in D.C. (99% of them Southerners, I'll wager), plenty of rude white women, and the occasional rude non-white. But the examples that stick in my mind, and in my craw, include either stubby little balding sweaty white men in their overly tight suits, or shabby, bearded academic types, or slick young attorneys and staffers who glance at themselves in every shiny window they pass on the sidewalk.
They don't observe social etiquette, and I doubt many of them create anything valuable. Shame on all of them, and for the rest of us men for not slapping them square on their mealy mouths whenever they break into a line, or fail to yield their seats to the elderly, or yap on their cell phones in that effete overeducated voice that was equally ubiquitous, I am certain, in the upper circles of Louis XIV's France.
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Had a chance to visit Monticello. Observed a lack of quality control in the tour guides. My group drew a middle-aged Southern woman whose voice and bearing commanded respect. We all listened obediently as she explained the interesting history associated with each room.
Well, almost all -- I found myself distracted by the tour guide who was leading a group behind us. While our guide explained how Thomas Jefferson used to keep meticulous weather records, and wrote over 20,000 pieces of correspondence during his lifetime, I kept catching snippets from the next room like this:
"...women weren't allowed..."
"...slaves didn't have..."
"...only white men could..."
I doubt the guide in the next room said anything untruthful. But I wonder what her charges were left with, other than an impression that Thomas Jefferson was a typical patriarchal old white dude whose slaves built him a nice house on a hill. It seems that political correctness increasingly demands that we not only ritually denounce, as a form of false penitence, all who owned slaves (except African tribal leaders, of course), but that we also obliterate from memory the good and noble things they created (or worse, perpetuate the myth that these things were really mostly the result of African ingenuity).
As a Presbyterian I'm all for communal guilt, but -- not to put too fine an academic point on it -- give me a freaking break already.
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Memo
To: Management, Hardee's Restaurants
From: T.W.
Subject: Stench
My years in management consulting tell me that a reek resembling a slaughteryard outhouse is not conducive to sustainable customer volume.
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My son Caleb is a little ham. Older chicks dig him. Strange women have been known to give him money just for being cute. We are in a near-empty restaurant, after a messy meal, getting our things ready to leave. He's kung-fu-ing me, which consists of standing about three feet away (so I can't tickle him) and shooting his little hand out in my direction while making a "foosh" sound. Every time he does it, I lurch back in my seat, he giggles, and the waitresses all laugh in that cute way eighteen year-old girls have.
Eventually one, then another, then another ends up near him; he is surrounded by chicks, and he doesn't have the good sense to be anything but annoyed that they are inhibiting his judo chops. I take his hand, thank our waitress, and we head for the door. He turns around and, waving with his free hand, says "Bye, ladies!"
The ladies, of course, fall all over themselves at how cute this is, which is why I taught him to say it. One day, son, you'll thank me.
Posted by Woodlief on July 01, 2002 at 08:48 AM
