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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Every time I go to downtown Boston, I’m reminded of one of my dorkier moments.
“New England is known for its tricky names; ‘Worcester’ shrinks down to ‘Wistah‘, ‘Leominster’ becomes ‘Leminstah‘, and ‘ ‘Hartford’ becomes ‘the tahn in Connecticut that’s a pahking laht in rush houah‘.”
(Actually, depending on the specific area of Boston, I might be reminded of several of my dorkier moments. In my defense, I didn’t have my contacts in that one night, and if that chick in the boots was a cop, she should have told me. That’s the rule.
Also, I’m sure lots of people pee on that statue. I can’t possibly be the only one.)
Anyway, my possibly incarceratible transgressions in the heart of the Hub aren’t the point. I have a more innocuous — though no less embarrassing — episode in mind. It happened several years ago, back when the wife and I were new to the Boston area…
< wavy flashback lines >
< wavy flashback lines >
< wavy flashback lines >
One of the most famous and well-traveled areas of Boston proper is Faneuil Hall. It hosts restaurants, shops, and even a comedy club (where I would later perform).
But in the first few days I lived in Boston, a chief concern was pronouncing the name of the downtown shopping area. New England is known for its tricky names; ‘Worcester’ shrinks down to ‘Wistah‘, ‘Leominster’ becomes ‘Leminstah‘, and ‘ ‘Hartford’ becomes ‘the tahn in Connecticut that’s a pahking laht in rush houah‘.
But none of this prepares the newcomer for ‘Faneuil Hall’. It’s properly pronounced FAN-yuhl Hall, but there’s no easy way to sound that out from the letters provided. The established rules of grammar are sadly silent on matters concerning noises to be derived from ‘euil’ letter combinations.
The ambiguity wasn’t an issue for my first few days in Boston. But then, some friends of the missus offered to accompany us downtown, to ‘show us the ropes’. They’d lived here considerably longer than our two weeks in town, and we trusted them to take us to Boston’s finest areas. They made a veritable beeline for Faneuil Hall, with us in tow.
Looking to score some points, I read the name from a sign and asked:
‘So, do you guys often come down to Fan-YOO-uh-weel Hall?‘
‘Do we do what, where now?‘
‘Do you come here often, down to FAIN-ah-ooh-uhl Hall‘
‘Um… sure, sometimes. But it’s pronounced FAN-yuhl.‘
I didn’t miss a beat. My desperate need to save face knows no bounds:
‘Oh. Well, I’ve heard it pronounced both ways.‘
I nodded confidently as I made this ridiculous claim, as though it had any basis in fact whatsoever. No one in three hundred years ever called it FAIN-ah-ooh-uhl Hall, with the possible exception of Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr.
(Come on, that’s an easy one. It’s spelled just like it sounds. Simple.)
Still I claimed I’d heard it, with a straight face and steady voice. Our friends, who clearly knew better, just let it go. Remarkably, neither of them called me on the ruse. At any moment, I expected them to ask,
‘Sorry, is this FAIN-ah-ooh-uhl Hall, or was that FIN-ya-hoo-eel? We ask merely so that we may mingle in with the natives as easily as yourself.‘
But they never did. So I spent the rest of the day butchering the name at will — FARN-yurl, fen-YOO-ill, fin-ah-ee-yuh-UHL, you name it. Partly it was to see whether they’d finally correct me. Partly it was because I’m a raging, incorrigible smartass.
But mostly it was because I kept seeing the stupid word, and I could not, for the life of me, remember how to say the stupid thing correctly. So I dorked it up for a full afternoon, and claimed ‘I’ve heard it both ways’ any time it seemed to be an issue.
Looking back — holy god, that’s embarrassing. I hope nobody besides my wife’s friends heard me being an idiot that day. It’s bad enough knowing I’ve been a jackass; what if some impressionable young kid heard me calling the place FRANCHY-hoo-hah Hall? And then repeated it, and then said, truthfully:
‘Yeah, but I’ve heard it pronounced that way before.‘
Ouch, baby. Very ouch.
Permalink | 3 CommentsI played volleyball last night. As usual, I found a way to mildly injure myself. I never hurt myself badly out there — nothing life-, limb-, or manhood-threatening. But they’d take away my weekend warrior card if I walked out of the gym without some sort of ache, pull, limp, or a hitch in my giddyup.
(The doc says someday I may need a prosthetic giddyup. Or even a giddyup transplant. I’m not looking forward to that.)
Anyway, on this particular night, I managed to futz up my right knee. I bumped it, I wrenched it a little, there may have been some mild ‘popping’. All in all, just another night at the gym. No biggie.
I woke up this morning to some pain and swelling in that knee, and limped around getting ready for work. It slowed me down somewhat, but I managed to make it out of the house and to the office. I got onto the elevator and rode up to the main floor.
That’s where the fun began.
“The doc says someday I may need a prosthetic giddyup. Or even a giddyup transplant.”
In the lobby, this guy got on the elevator. He works on my floor. I don’t know him, really, but he’s always very friendly, says hello to everyone, seems like a nice guy. Also, he has this little quirk; because of some congenital defect or unfortunate accident, or possibly pissing off a bookie during his youth, he walks with a pronounced and permanent limp.
And that’s pretty much where the fun ended.
When we reached our floor, the door opened. My elevator companion, being the polite and upstanding gent that he is, stepped aside to let me go first. And I had no choice. So I thanked him, nodded, and limped past him.
He stepped out and limped right beside me. And I wondered — does he think I’m mocking him? He’s never seen me limp before; maybe he thinks I’m faking it. How would I like it if he came to my cube and pretended to sleep on my desk? That wouldn’t be very nice.
Or maybe he thinks it’s a sympathetic reaction of some kind, like I’m subconsciously limping because I’m walking next to him. And to be fair, I did notice that we were lurching to one side in unison after a couple of steps, but I was powerless to stop. For one thing, I was really limping too, and couldn’t easily change my rhythm. Also, we happened to be limping on the same leg. If I’d gotten out of sync beside him, we’d have bumped heads and knocked each other out. I get into enough trouble for sleeping at my desk, without getting caught conked out in the hallway.
I thought about apologizing for my limp, to avoid any unpleasantness. But how the hell would that work?
‘Hey, dude. I’m not dissing you with this limp or anything. Really.’
< uncomfortable silence >
‘See, mine’s just temporary, is all. Not… um, like yours. You know.‘
< really uncomfortable silence >
‘So, uh, this is my cube farm here. I’ll catch you later. Hope that other leg grows out for you. Or something.‘
That would have gone just swimmingly. So I shrugged at him helplessly between limps, faced forward, and prayed to god he didn’t kick me in the ass with his one good leg.
Lucky for me, he didn’t. But who knew a wiggly knee ligament could be an occupational hazard? I’ve really got to find a safer way to exercise.
Permalink | No CommentsI’ve hit the time in life when many of my friends are having children. Several of them already have kids, of varying sizes and ages. I don’t see these friends nearly as much as I used to.
“There are all sorts of things they have to buy — cribs and clothes and little itty-bitty straightjackets and such.”
It’s not because I’m allergic to children or anything — although I could be! — but rather that raising children is apparently a challenging and full-time job.
A what, now?
My parental friends try to put it into terms they think I can understand. They say:
‘Imagine hosting a big party, where you have to grill and entertain guests constantly, and no one leaves for eighteen years.‘
I’m not following. I could still drink and eat, and kick people the hell out when I get tired, right?
‘Not legally, no. How about this — having kids is like being at a bar where you never get drunk, but you have to keep buying rounds for the whole crowd anyway.‘
Can’t you walk down the block to the next bar, where the booze isn’t watered down?
‘Hrm. It’s like a strip club where the girls don’t get naked and the cover charge includes four years tuition at a private school.‘
I’m not following.
‘A football game where you pay for other people’s tickets but you have to stay in the parking lot.‘
Come again?
‘A hundred thousand dollar bag of pork rinds you don’t get to eat for twenty years.‘
I don’t understand.
‘Like blogging, only with more projectile vomiting.‘
I understand completely. It’s all so simple when you put it that way, you poor, miserable bastards.
Seriously, I understand why the folks with kids spend more time at home. There are all sorts of things those kids need to learn about getting along in the world, and treating others with respect, and how to attack a zone defense. That takes time.
Also, I entirely understand if some of these guys are staying away to keep me from corrupting their young kids’ impressionable, squishy little minds. Nobody wants to hear:
‘Daddy, Uncle Charlie says we should go to the booby bar. What’s a ‘booby bar’? And did the devil really invent ‘pasties’?‘
I can see where that could be awkward. But I stand by my position on pasties. You have to draw the line somewhere.
More interesting to me are the friends who curtail their social calendar because they’re ‘trying‘ to have kids. Now I know this actually means that they’re preparing for children they might soon have. There are all sorts of things they have to buy — cribs and clothes and little itty-bitty straightjackets and such. And of course, they’re saving money by staying in, which they’ll be sorely needing for the next several decades. So I completely understand.
On the other hand, when one of those friends says that they can’t come out to play because they’re ‘trying to have kids’, I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that they’re staying home to conceive a child. Like, that night. Hardly a mental image I need when I’m out for nachos and a few beers on a Saturday evening.
Or frankly, ever. Much more of that, and my blogging will have its share of projectile vomiting, too. Yeeks.
Permalink | 1 CommentBack in high school, I had an English teacher who introduced the class to the phrase ‘functionally fixed’. She used it to point out snippets of our writing assignments that had lost impact through common use, phrases that weren’t quite ‘cliche’, but didn’t grab the readers’ attention, either.
Later, I learned more about the meaning and origins of ‘functional fixedness’, and I’m not convinced she borrowed the right term for the job. Those words she kept using — I do not think they mean what she thinks they mean.
“If she wanted us to avoid cliches, fine. But she was going to lose some sleep over it, dammit.”
Of course, that didn’t stop her from red-markering ‘FF!!‘ all over our damned papers, and bumping us down a grade or two based on her subjective old woman notions of what she considered creative prose. After a while, we morphed ‘FF’ to mean something completely different and far nastier, but there was little we could do. She was the teacher, after all, and we were the snotty teenage peons. Having a clever turn of phrase deemed ‘functionally fixed’ seemed a mysterious and arbitrary decision, but we could hardly fight it.
So I tried to beat her at her own game.
Every time I had the opportunity to use a phrase I suspected would get the dreaded ‘FF!!‘, I’d go back and change it — which is exactly what she wanted. But what I’d change it to was the weirdest, most disturbing equivalent I could think of without being overtly obscene. If she wanted us to avoid cliches, fine. But she was going to lose some sleep over it, dammit.
So I waxed pervertically to get my points across. Here are a few of the substitutions I used:
‘He felt like he was preaching to the choir.’ =>
‘He felt like he was wearing tassels to the strip club.‘
‘She was hot like fire.’ =>
‘She was hot like a napalm enema.’
‘He left the meeting with his tail between his legs.’ =>
‘He left the meeting with his ego wrinkly and shriveled up inside him.‘
‘It was as plain as the nose on my face.’ =>
‘It was as plain as the nipples on a wet nurse.‘
‘They said old man Johnson was as crazy as a fox.’ =>
‘They said old man Johnson was nutty like a YMCA locker room.‘
‘She was the sort to make mountains out of molehills.’ =>
‘She was the sort to make melons out of mosquito bites.‘
The good news was, I never saw the dreaded ‘FF!!‘ on my papers again.
On the other hand, my English paper grades didn’t go up at all. And I spent a lot of time with the school psychologist after that. That would have sucked, if she weren’t a MILF in shrink’s clothing.
You know, so to speak.
Permalink | 1 CommentThis morning, I was rudely and unexpectedly awakened by the shrill buzz of our doorbell. I have a very simple policy concerning unexpected doorbells: I treat them in the same way as television commercials, would-be hitchhikers, or lost children at the airport.
That is, I ignore them, and hope they go away.
I had just worked up a really good ignore and was drifting my way toward dreamland when the knock on the door came, loud:
‘BAM BAM BUMP BANG BAM!‘
That got my attention. The tiny sliver of attention I could muster in my drooling early morning haze, at least. I ran through the likely candidates of who might be at the door:
A neighbor? Screw ’em.
A local politician? Nah, the election’s over. And anyway, screw ’em.
Jehovah’s Witnesses? Screw ’em, smack ’em with a Bible, and screw ’em again.
Some contractor, coming to do some expensive bit of tinkering? Oooh… no. My wife always tells me in advance when those guys are scheduled.
“I have a very simple policy concerning unexpected doorbells: I treat them in the same way as television commercials, would-be hitchhikers, or lost children at the airport.”
Speaking of which, how about my wife? She knows my ‘don’t ask, don’t answer’ doorbell policy. If she forgets her keys, she’s got two options — bang like hell on the door until I open it, or slither through the doggy door. And I’m in trouble if I’m in the house, and she has to use the doggy door. Again.
(Yeah, it happened once. I’m pretty sure we’ll laugh about it together some day. But when I mention it now, I spend the night on the couch.
Too soon. Must be too soon.)
So, I figured it was my wife. I didn’t figure that she’d been gone for two hours, or that if it wasn’t my wife, whoever was there probably wouldn’t enjoy seeing me wearing nothing but bedhead and a rumpled pair of boxer shorts. So I stumbled down to the door.
It was a contractor. He was there to check our water heater. My wife forgot to tell me about the appointment. And he did not look happy to see me.
(For the record, I didn’t look that happy to see him, either.
I mean, I want the heater fixed before winter, but I made sure my boxers fly was closed, too. Even my wife doesn’t want to see that.)
Eventually, the guy got the heater checked out, while I combed my hair and made myself marginally presentable. He didn’t even charge me for the work when he left. He said it was ‘on the house’.
Hey, whaddaya know? Maybe my fly was open when I answered the door. How you doin’?
Permalink | 1 Comment
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