Celebrating Ourselves

Apparently my brain on echinacea and coffee together was found to be amusing and/or alarming by some of my friends.  Today, though, I want to tell you about someone I met yesterday who was either 1. on something more alarming than over the counter medications, OR 2. high on life.

Okay, warning time for small children and people who don't like swearing.  I'm not going to swear.  BUT the person I want to tell about did when I met her, so I will just use the first letter of the word and some exclamation points and ampersands and stuff like that to fill out the rest of the B-word.

But that reminds me of a time when Jeremiah was in Kindergarten.  One night when I was putting him to bed (that's when he asks his difficult questions, as opposed to Sierra who asks them as I'm roaring down the freeway at 70 miles per hour) and he asked me a question about "the f-word."  Actually he asked me what the hand sign for the F-word is.  I asked him "what f-word?" and breathed a sigh of relief that he didn't know.  I asked him who had told him there IS such a word.  He said the name of the boy in his class who, to be honest, didn't surprise me one bit to be the bearer of such arcane knowledge.

I told Jeremiah that there is indeed such a word and people would think he was not a nice boy if he went around saying it or making some kind of hand sign for it.  So, I went on, I'm not going to tell you that right now because I know you might have a hard time not saying it at school and I don't want to put you in that situation just yet.  He accepted that, then as he was about to drift off to sleep, he lifted his little head off the pillow and said, "Well, then will you tell me the E-word?"  

As it turns out, studying the alphabet being in the forefront of his sleepy brain, he thought there was one bad word for each letter. 

Well, back to the b-word that rhymes with witch.

I stopped for coffee yesterday at a gas station convenience store in a small town near Bloomington where I was working.  The woman behind the counter was singing along to the radio, loudly, and having a grand old time waiting on her customers while she belted out the lyrics to...Elton John's "The B*(&# is Back"  which is a good thing for those of us who were born a while back to recall while lamenting lyrics of today's rap...so when she got to the lines "I'm a B*#($, I'm a b*_($*" it was my turn to pay for my cup of coffee.  She looked at my coffee and said "is that all?" and I said "yes" and she said "that coffee is on the house!  Have a great day."

So I leaned across the counter and whispered to her, "I don't think you are a b()#*" and she said, as loudly as possible, "Oh, yes, I am!  When I was little they asked me 'what do you want to be good at when you are grown up?' and I picked B(#)*!"  Then she added "and it is SUCH a joy!"

Laughing all the way to my car, I thought, yeah, why not?  So let's all enjoy what we are best at, sing it out loud, celebrate even things about us that other people find annoying.  Especially those things.  I think I will sing in front of my kids and try to kiss them as I drop them off for school today.