Maya, my six-year-old daughter, approached my home-office desk the other day and stood behind me for a moment. I face a wall, sort of box-canyon like, because the home office is a small converted dining room. But I could see her hazy reflection in the monitor.
She should have been having snack. I’d walked the puggle over to the bus stop, walked the puggle and the two daughters back home, placed a peanut butter tub (Lily) and a soy nut butter tub (Maya, allergic to peanuts), one sticky honey squeeze bottle (Maya), one mostly empty jam jar (Lily), two plates, two knives and two glasses of milk on the table for snack. I view doing this to be like giving the dog a cow tibia. Here you go. See you in 15.
It was more like three.
“Dad.”
“Yes Maya.”
“Lily called me the ‘F’ word.”
I stopped typing. I swiveled. Her chin was soy nut buttered. Blonde hair everywhere.
“She what?”
I was thinking: Lily’s nine. I hadn’t heard the ‘F’ word bandied about among the third-grade set, particularly as a pronoun. So this was big. Not good.
“Lily called me the ‘F’ word.”
“Lily!” I said, not significantly louder than I’d been speaking anyway. Our house is small; Lily was listening anyway.
“Yes,” came the answer, peanut-butter impaired.
“Could you come here please?”
“Yes,” she said. A moment later she stood next to Maya, not much taller, hair much better-controlled.
“Maya says you called her something,” I said.
“She called me the ‘F’ word,” Maya said again.
“Yes I did,” Lily said, having finished chewing. The gravity of the term seemed to be escaping her.
“Maya,” I asked, “What’s the ‘F’ word?”
“Freak,” she said.
—
I was running a few quick errands with Maya today, reflections off the giant smile of a crack in the minivan windshield distracting me. Had dropped Lily off at the rink and mail at the Montclair post office, had swung through the Wells Fargo ATM, and was headed down Colfax Avenue to the new Ace Hardware on Oneida. Colfax is gentrifying, but slowly, and it’s still a medical-marijuana-dispensary kind of scene. Outside one green-cross-sporting place a guy stood bouncing and swinging around an arrow-shaped sign. On it was printed, as best as I could read with all the bouncing and swinging, “1/8 ounce, $25.”
Maya saw it, too. She didn’t ask why the man was standing outside jiggling around a sign. These people seem ubiquitous on the lesser boulevards of Denver. Sometimes, they wear chicken suits. Almost always, though not this time, I say, “You don’t want to be a human signpost for a living, ladies,” and hold short discourse on the importance of cognitive development and skill differentiation.
I hadn’t done that this time, perhaps distracted by sharp reflections from my injured windshield.
“What’s he selling for $25?” Maya asked.
“Oh, medicine,” I said.
As I turned left into the ACE lot a minute or so later, Maya announced, “I learned a new swear word.”
“Really,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“What is the swear word, Maya?”
The was silence in the pink booster behind me.
“Maya, I know lots of swear words. It’s O.K. to say it.”
“Shit,” she said, slowly, deliberately, as if it were a spelling-bee answer.
My smile was about the size of the windshield crack. I held back a chuckle.
“Where’d you learn that, Maya?”
“I saw it on a sign,” she said.
2 Comments
I learned my first swear words when I was 5, from my best friend. It didn’t matter that he was a refugee from the collateral damage caused by the war between the Egyptians and the Israelis. What mattered was the look on my mom and dad’s faces when I used them. I still remember the conversations my dad had with me, about what not to say and when.
Too funny. My son and his friend started talking about the “N” word. They didn’t even want to tell me what they thought it was. I finally squeezed it out of them. It turned out to be a word their preschool teacher didn’t like…”nub”.
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