the exclamation

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Yesterday, as we were getting ready to leave for the Indians game, we spied J's shirts on the clothesline under the mulberry tree. I did not put them there. I was reared in this city. Unless you want your shirts to smell like a blend of steel mill exudate and bus exhaust, you don't hang 'em on a clothesline in a city yard. I don't care what the fabric softener commercials tell you.

J doesn't think this way. You can practically see the wheels turn. "There are trees in our yard, and flowers, and plants. If I hang my shirts in the clothesline, they will smell fresh and sweet." Actually, I hung the clothesline for hockey gear, but it never gets used for that. The wheels turn, but the direction is sometimes rather unpredictable.

As we grabbed the shirts off the line to put indoors, J said: "Ohhhhh, NO! Mama, my shirt is ruined!"

First off, don't call me Mama unless you are either under ten or writing an R&B song about me. And DON'T get between me and an Indians game, especially not with the brilliant announcement that you have hung your work shirts on a backyard clothesline directly under a mulberry tree and they are now stained not with just any mulberries but with gently used mulberries courtesy of Our Friends, The Backyard Birds.

"Oh, piss in the shithouse!" I snapped and grabbed the shirt, opened the back door and trotted down into the basement in search of some bleach and an old toothbrush.

J followed me downstairs.

"What did you say?" he asked. He didn't ask archly or threateningly, he was genuinely curious.

For a moment, I honestly could not remember that I had said anything at all. Then I recalled my rather vulgar exclamation. Oh, great, I thought, now I'm going to get picked on for cussing.

"I said, 'Oh, piss in the shithouse!'", I reiterated, glad for an excuse to cuss again.

"Piss in the shithouse," he mused. "That does not sound like a problem. Now, if one had shit in the pisshouse, that could be a problem, I believe."

He was serious. Dead serious. He was thinking about the engineering parameters of the problem and judging whether they made any sense.

I was shocked silent for about a second, and then I started laughing. At first I was just giggling, but eventually I was guffawing, and finally I ended up speechless, tears rolling down my cheeks. He couldn't understand what could possibly be so funny. I gesticulated weakly, toothbrush in one hand, wet shirt in the other, and tried to explain. "You...it was....you were thinking it....thinking it out...piss...in the....oh, GAWD!" I finished weakly. I had to sit down on the basement steps.

James Thurber wrote a story called "The Curb In The Sky." It's about a man whose wife contradicts him every time he tries to tell a story in company. To defend himself, the man hits on a great plan. He will tell about his dreams. Since his wife cannot know what he dreamt, how can she possibly contradict him? All is well until he repeats the telling of a dream....

When I was young, I didn't think that story was funny. In fact, I had difficulty understanding it. Why didn't the man just tell his wife to stop contradicting him?

Now I understand that story very well. In fact, I think I'll write another. But wait. "Piss in the Shithouse" is probably not going to knock 'em dead over at Viking Books.

I think I'll leave it alone. Nobody'd believe it wasn't fiction anyway.