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LAST HURRAH: Arrggh!

At my next parent-teacher conference, I promise to watch my salty language.
By Tim Rogers |

I have a scar on my right thumb where my father bit me while we were wrestling in the street. This was a few years back. We’d just exited a pool hall, where I’d relieved him of a fair amount of money. And we’d been over-served. So when I started taunting him about his lousy play, he brought it. Knowing he was outmatched, the old man resorted to his chompers.

He would disagree with some of the particulars of this story (whether he’d lost money, who bit whom, if he was even my father), but that’s not the point. The point is, my father and I now have a close relationship, which wasn’t always so. After my folks got divorced—and before they got divorced—he wasn’t around much. So I resolved that when I got married and had kids, I’d do a better job of it than my father. Just like how I shoot pool.

That’s what I was patting myself on the back for the other day, when I accompanied My Fair Lady to a parent-teacher conference for my own boy, a first-grader. We hunkered down at one of those tiny first-grade tables with The Boy’s teacher, sitting in tiny first-grade chairs. The Boy played out in the hall, where other parents waited their turn. In My Fair Lady’s lap sat our 4-month-old girl, happily babbling.

Look at me! Present and accounted for! Concerned father! Made all the grander by your undersized furniture!

And the news was wonderful. The Boy is doing splendid schoolwork, his teacher told us. She said he reads independently and is well-prepared for second grade. He consistently aces his spelling tests. His math skills put him at the top of his class. Indeed, she praised us for raising such an intelligent, well-adjusted, self-confident child. My Fair Lady and I beamed.

“Do you have any questions?” the teacher asked.

Questions? What questions could we possibly have after an update like that? “On a scale of 1 to 10—1 being “kinda,” 10 being “very”—how awesome, exactly, are we as parents?” Or,”Where is our trophy?”

We shrugged modestly and told her that we couldn’t think of any questions.

“Well, I’d like to mention one thing,” The Boy’s teacher said. “And I only bring this up because your son said something about it.”

“Hey,” I told her. “You don’t need to preface a critical remark with an apology. Whatever it is, go right ahead.”

“We were talking as a class about bad language, why you shouldn’t say bad words, what you should do when you hear someone else using them. Your son raised his hand and said, ’When my dad is with his friends, they use bad language. And I wish they’d stop.’”

My wife inhaled sharply, as if she’d stepped into a cold shower. One or two painfully long seconds elapsed in silence, as I considered my response. Unless I was mistaken, the teacher had paused dramatically before she’d delivered the line, “I wish they’d stop.”

I looked over my shoulder to confirm that The Boy was still playing in the hall and beyond earshot. Then I leaned in and said to the teacher, “I’m so sorry. I’ll have a word with those a–holes.”

If My Fair Lady hadn’t been holding The Baby, she would have hit me. She of the virgin lips, o’er which have ne’er flown profanity. Right.

That night, back at the house, My Fair Lady made me promise to have a talk with my friends about their language. My language. The language we use. Whatever. The talk went well. They mocked me mercilessly, but they kept it clean.

The next day, I sent my dad an e-mail, relating the episode—The Boy’s good report, my clever rejoinder, the whole thing. “Don’t jive me,” he replied. “Did you really say that to the teach?”

I assured him that I was not jiving him. And I could tell he was impressed. He didn’t come right out and say it, but my father was proud of me. For the wrong reason, sure. Or at least in addition to the right one. But sons will take from their fathers whatever they can get. Dammit.

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