(My mom is in the kitchen eating a salad she just made and I am sitting at the counter a few feet away. My brother walks in just as my mom tilts the bowl, stabs a piece of lettuce, and spills the salad all over the floor, startling everyone with the clatter of the fork.)
Brother: “What happened?!”
Mom: “I tossed my salad!” *proceeds to crack up*
(My dad drives an extended cab Chevy Silverado and Mom and I have just finished shopping at the local mall. She doesn’t drive the truck often so she’s not used to it and is taking extra care to make sure she has plenty of room navigating the parking lot. She has just completed a turn. I’m about 8 years old.)
Me: “Why did you take such a big turn?”
Mom: “To make sure I don’t bump into things. This truck doesn’t turn on a dime.”
Me: *having never heard this phrase before* ‘Yeah, it turns more on a quarter.”
(She had to stop the truck, she was laughing so hard.)
When I was learning how to drive, my father would have me practice in his car. Since I am significantly shorter than him, I would always have to move his seat forward, and then he would have to move it back if he wanted to drive.
One day, shortly after I practice driving with him, Dad decides he needs to run an errand. I don’t remember where it was, but he needed to go somewhere that was about a twenty-minute drive away. He came into my room and told me to drive him, because he didn’t feel like readjusting the driver’s seat. To recap: my dad made me waste nearly an hour being his chauffeur because he couldn’t be a**ed to spend thirty seconds adjusting the driver’s seat of his car.
(We are playing mini-golf as a family for the first time. I am 13, and my brother is five. Everything is going well until I notice something: my brother is doing very well!)
Brother: *putts*
Me: “Wait, he’s doing it wrong!”
Mom: “Shh.”
Me: “But he’s not hitting the ball with his club. He’s dragging it to the hole!”
Mom: “Just let him have his fun.”
Me: “But…”
Dad: “He’s too young to know.”
(They told me to ignore it, so I did. My brother won. All I could think about is when I was his age and I would lose a game, they would laugh.)
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(I work in the deer pen at a local zoo. In my area we have an enclosure for a Eurasian lynx. The lynx is found throughout Europe and into Russia.)
Guest #1: “Hey, Dad, look at this animal! It’s a lynx!”
Guest #2: “Oh, that’s nice son. Let’s look at the sign.”
(The guest spends a few moments reading until he stumbles upon something he doesn’t like and quickly turns and grabs his son’s hand briskly walking away.)
Guest #2: “We don’t like that one, son. It’s a communist.”
