6 Little Stories

If you’ve ever sat in a doctor’s waiting room, you may have read the funny, little stories in Reader’s Digest.

Back in the day, Randy and I raked up a bunch of little stories to submit to Reader’s Digest. They paid $50 per published story and we figured we could keep ourselves in tequila for a month or two. We created the list, closed the notebook, and never finished the project. So much for tequila based motivation.

Recently, pack rat Randy flipped through a stack of old notebooks and found the original list. We read the list and he encouraged me to finish the project here. I mean fuck Reader’s Digest, right? They weren’t going to pay us for stories titled “Daddy, Fuckin’ Daddy” or “Fat Bastard” anyway.

None of these little stories are stout enough for a single post, so I combined them.

Many years ago I worked in downtown Cincinnati. As a happening twenty somethings, my friends and I would used to eat lunch outdoors at fountain square. I was eating my peanut butter and jelly (Yes, I know it was peanut butter and jelly, it was the only lunch I ever packed) when I noticed an elderly blind couple had gotten separated from each other.

The husband was panicked and shouting for his wife. No one else was helping, so I ran across the square and touched his elbow. I said “Your wife is right over here, can I help you get to her”? He sighed and thanked me and said “I don’t know why I was yelling for her, she’s deaf, too”.

Randy has a habit of wandering away when we are in stores. He’s constantly lost. When my baby boy was actually a baby, no more than 18 months old, we were at the grocery and Randy wandered off. I couldn’t find him and I looked at Joey and said “Where is your daddy, Joey”? Joey looked up at me and said “Where is daddy? Fucking daddy”. Poor kid never stood a chance.

We’re permissive parents. I never worried too much about my kids watching movies that had cursing in them, or movies that other parents worried were age inappropriate. So, when Joey was around 4 years old, one of his favorite movies was Austin Powers. At the time, we lived in a small town where everyone knew everyone.

We were at the local beauty parlor and Joey was getting his curls trimmed up. I sat across the room listening to him talk, as was everyone else. Joey was fun to listen to. He had a great vocabulary and it was like listening to a little adult. They were talking about Shrek and Joey said that he really liked Mike Meyers and that he liked him as Austin Powers.

As soon as I heard the conversation turn to Austin Powers I thought Shit…shit shit. He’s going to say fat bastard. I know he’s going to say fat bastard. The conversation was just about to turn and I thought the moment had passed. But Rhonda, the stupid hairdresser said, “I like Austin Powers a lot. And Mike Meyers plays other characters in that, like Doctor Evil and…and…that other guy. Joey perks up “Oh! You mean fat bastard”!

My older son is 29 now. When he was two, he was at the park with my mother. A baby bird had fallen from it’s nest. It had feathers but still too small to fly. Zach crouched down and looked at it and said “Grandma, can I touch it”? My mother said to touch it very very easy and he did. He barely touched it and was very gentle. Then he looked at my mother and said “Grandma, can I step on it”?

Joey was a music snob before he got out of preschool. He and Randy joined a work friend and I for lunch one day. The weather was nice and we were sitting outside. My work friend made conversation with Joey and asked what he had been doing that morning. Joey said “I’ve been listening to music”. My work friend said “Oh, nice. Do you like those Kidz Bop CDs”? Joey actually sneered a little 4 year old sneer and said “No. I do not. I was listening to The Screaming Blue Messiahs. Kidz Bops would never sing Jesus Chrysler Drives a Dodge”.

I didn’t work when Zach was in Kindergarten. I used to volunteer in his classroom. His teacher pulled me aside one day and said that one of Zach’s classmates had just moved here from Japan. Also, she said the child’s mother spoke very little English and was lonely. They lived in our apartment complex and Zach’s teacher asked if I would invite her over for coffee or something. I was very happy to do so.

She had a Japanese to English dictionary and we communicated by looking up words and sometimes drawing pictures. She was trying very hard to learn English. One afternoon my new Japanese friend came over with her kids and brought me a gift of little paper dolls. A slip of paper was attached with Japanese written on it. I asked her what it said. She rifled through the dictionary looking up the words. I thought maybe I was going to hear some Japanese wisdom or maybe a short sentence about the paper dolls and their meaning. She looked up from the dictionary and smiled. “Made in Tokyo”. I’m not sure, but I probably offended her when I laughed until I cried.

Like I said, these weren’t really appropriate for Reader’s Digest, but they fit right in this fucking blog. Do you have any little stories to tell?

 

 

79 Thoughts.

    • Hahaha. I remember that so clearly. All the chairs were filled…NO ONE else was talking…and I’m thinking…don’t say fat bastard..don’t say fat bastard…DAMMIT. He said fat bastard.

  1. Priceless! But you’re right; I don’t think “Reader’s Digest” would have given them their proper appreciation.

    When our older son was four years old, (OMG! That was 40 years ago!) his younger brother was born. Although he’d expressed a modicum of enthusiasm at the prospect of having another kid in the house, he was less than enthusiastic at the reality. When I was walking the kids around the block a couple months after #2 made his debut, #1 looked at me very seriously and said, “I changed my mind. I don’t want a baby; I just want a cat.” (We DID get a cat… but we kept the kid.)

  2. Ha! These are hilarious! It’s funny to hear stories about places I am so familiar with as well I can always get a great picture in my head! I was checking out at the grocery story one time and my daughter was oddly facing straight front of the grocery cart while I was at the other end putting the food on the cart. She wasn’t trying to climb out or do any crazy shit which wasn’t like her. This worried me so I said Sarah? She didn’t answer me, I said Sarah turn around and look at mommy and she just shook her head at which point I said Sarah turn your ass around here and look at me this minute. She started moving very slowly around toward me and she has a box of donuts, a face full of chocolate and had taken a bite out of every single donut in the box!

  3. Funny. Reader’s Digest doesn’t know what they’re missing. When my oldest was about 4 I guess it was, I took him to Payless shoes. We were checking out and my son was looking at the cashier and kept saying, “You’re an old lady, an old lady.” I about died. And she wasn’t an old lady, maybe to a 4 year old, but not too me. At least Fat Bastard’s name is really Fat Bastard. Can’t fault a kid for that one. 🙂

  4. Before I was born, there was a discussion of names for the new baby (me). Of course, this was before ultrasounds, so there was no way to know whether I was a boy or a girl until I made an appearance. Most people had a girl name and a boy name ready. Since this was a family with three girls already, they were naturally most interested in choosing a boy name.
    My 8-year-old sister’s suggestion?
    “If it’s a boy, can we name him Hemerrhoid?”
    She was a rather precocious reader and had seen the word somewhere, but had no idea what it meant. She just figured it would work for a boy because it started with a “him.”
    I’m sure she didn’t mean it as foreshadowing at all.

  5. These are fantastic, 🙂 I love mornings that start on a giggle.

    Also, there really ought to be a Reader’s Digest for people who say “fuck” a lot. Let’s get on that.

    As for a little story, I’ve got one. It’s about the Girl when she was a tot. Those are often the funniest. I think it is because if you didn’t laugh, you would have ended up in a mental institution with crayons clutched between your toes so you could write home.

    Aaanywho, when she was still the Bebe, the Girl suffered from what can only be described as “holy mother of GOD what did you eat, and how on earth did it summon Cthulhu into your diapers?” Or colic, according to the doctors. Whatever.

    The practical upshot of this was twofold. One, I could not put the Bebe down. She felt most comforted, comfortable, and non-Eldritch horror summoning when she was nestled against me. Two, sometimes in spite of all precautions to the contrary, there would be….incidents.
    One beautiful afternoon we were at the HEB picking up groceries. According to the then-Hubs, food was important and as I was the one home (2 weeks unpaid maternity leave, hut!), I should be the one to go and fetch it.
    So there I am, rambling through the store, Bebe nestled against me in the most adorable of fashions. I saw one the Tribe of Elderly Wimmen(1) heading towards me. “What a beautiful baby(2)! May I hold hold her?”
    And that is when the Bebe exploded at both ends. Poo curdled down my leg, into my faux-Birkenstocks. Barf cascaded down my back, tangling in my then quite long hair. A mildly annoyed “FUCK!” escaped my lips. To her credit, the lady still offered to hold the Bebe while I cleaned up. I declined, made sure I wasn’t going to leave any biological horrors in my wake, and squelched back out to the car.

    …I just realized that while I have been laughing about this for fourteen years, this may not be as funny to other folks. I dunno. By the time I got home that afternoon, I was laughing so hard tears were squirting out my eyes and I couldn’t catch my breath.
    In retrospect, it might have been the sleep deprivation that caused that reaction.

    _______________
    (1) These are the older women or men who offer unsolicited parenting advice, touch pregnant women’s bellies without asking, etc. They aren’t bad, per se. Just often wildly inappropriate.
    (2) She really was. Like disgust-o amounts of gorgeous.

  6. Oh yes, I have a truck driver’s mouth but when my first born was little I tried to constrain myself.
    One day while putting away groceries, I opened the fridge and a dozen eggs dropped out and ALL smashed on the floor.
    Oh..(and then I paused not wanting to say the next word that came to my mind).
    My two year old son, looked up at me and finished by sentence:
    “Shit?, Mommy”.
    Sigh.

  7. Oh yes, I have a truck driver’s mouth but when my first born was little I tried to constrain myself.
    One day while putting away groceries, I opened the fridge and a dozen eggs dropped out and ALL smashed on the floor.
    Oh..(and then I paused not wanting to say the next word that came to my mind).
    My two year old son, looked up at me and finished my sentence:
    “Shit?, Mommy”.
    Sigh.

  8. LOVE “Fucking Daddy”. When my son was little, the Panic at the Disco! song “I Write Sins, Not Tragedies” was big and my son was very fond of telling people to “Close the Goddamn door”. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to say it at school.

  9. & thanks for the levity, Michelle – I need to blog about recent shitstorm(s) in my world, it’s cheap therapy for me! – but I appreciate the laughs more than you can ever know…

  10. When the manchild was 3, in one of those instances of “Holy crap, he was just here—where did he go?!”, he had shot into the bathroom “to shave like Daddy.” Unfortunately, he sliced his lip a bit. When Daddy was told what happened, Daddy jokingly said, “Michael, you mustn’t chew on razors.” Two days later at Disneyland, he approached strangers a half-dozen times with a most wise look on his face and solemnly announced, “I don’t chew on razors.” Of course, the strangers then gave us sympathetic looks, wondering if we also had to tell this little idiot that he shouldn’t roll under bus wheels or jump off the garage roof. We still laugh, and offer that advice: “hey, don’t chew on razors.”

  11. Love these! I saw them in my FB feed this morning and kept the tab open so I could gobble up your little gems while I ate my lunch at my desk! These stories are so funny! The one about the blind husband and deaf wife reminded me of this poem we used to say in grade school — are you familiar with it?
    One dark day in the middle of the night
    Two dead boys got up to fight
    Back to back, they faced each other
    Drew their swords, and shot each other
    A deaf policeman heard the noise
    And came to shoot the two dead boys
    If you don’t believe this tale is true —
    Ask the blind man — he saw it too!

  12. I think I like the music snob story the best (I would), but the “Fucking daddy” one is hilarious.
    OK. A friend once got an all-white kitten and wanted to name it “Shadow”, but thought it would be funnier to use the Spanish word instead. So he went up to a Mexican construction worker, pointed at a shadow on the floor, and asked him what the Spanish word for it was. The man told him it was suelo, so that’s what he named the kitten.
    A couple of years later his cousin, who spoke Spanish, was visiting, and asked him why he called his cat “floor”…

  13. I read through the Readers Digest cover to cover when I lived at home, until 17. Great stuff. I like their Condensed Books too.

    My little unexplainable story was how my Norton motorcycle would breakdown on the same road. It happened three times until I just learned to pass by that place. I actually got just a bit spooked by it. Coincidence? Almost certainly but there is that one small bit in my mind that says stay away.

  14. I used to work in a small stationery shop that also sold toys. One week we got in these awesome toy ray guns that lit up with spinning LEDs. They sold like crazy, the kids loved them. So one afternoon this little boy and his mother come in, and of course he makes a beeline for the ray guns. He points it as his mother and goes, “Pew pew, you’re dead!” His mother laughs and gasps, clutching the imaginary wound. He points it at my coworker. “Pew pew, you’re dead!” She gasps and reels backward He points it at me. “Pew pew, you’re dead!” “Oh no, you got me!” I exclaim, and fall forward on the counter. Finally, out of victims, the kid shrugs, points the gun at his own head and goes, “Suiciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide!”
    His mom didn’t let him buy the gun.

  15. You my dear, are brilliant! I’d buy the shit out a RD that your stories were featured in if it came to be! Apparently now though, I need to make my BF some popcorn and stop playing on the computer for a minute… LOL.

  16. I had to yell at some tiny 3 or 4 year old girl at the library yesterday for yelling “motherfucker”.

    Also, I think the “Jesus Chrysler Drives a Dodge” story would’ve been fine 😉

  17. Bloody funny indeed made me laugh and do I have a story well this comes to mind it is something my grandson Leo who is 7 said the other day

    Leo was eating a cocktail Frankfurt and peeled off the skin and said something I didn’t catch.
    Me: huh?
    Leo: you can’t eat people with their clothes on, that is just disgusting!
    What got me was he said it just so matter of factly.

  18. The elderly couple story belongs in RD and I really think you should resubmit it. The story about the paper dolls too.

    I had stories that I submitted to them – also never accepted – and I think I lost them a long time ago. And I have no memory of what they were about, but I am sure they were brilliant and funny and should have been accepted, just like yours should have been. 🙂

  19. I was a high school teacher when No.1 Son was a little bloke. One day his dad collected him from daycare and brought him to meet me when the bell rang. I taught at an exclusive boys school and one of my co-workers was an obese woman named Jan who was one tough and very unpopular teacher…(the boys called Planet Janet or Jantarctica). Her classroom was next to mine and we both emerged at about the same time. He saw me. Stopped. And instead of running to me fop a hug as he usually would, ran straight back to his dad shouting : “Hey Daddy… Come and see the giant lady… She’s even got fat feet…”
    About two hundred 16 year-old boys simultaneously wet themselves laughing.

  20. I wish I had been smart enough to write down the stuff my son said when he was small. He was hilarious — so much so that when he said something funny, I always thought, “I’m never going to forget that!” Of course, I forgot everything. Now when I tell him how funny he was as a youngster, but can’t give him examples, he just looks at me and shakes his head in pity.

  21. When K was about 3 (or some other age that was quite young) I was in the bath and she kept on coming in and out, opening and closing the door. So I asked her to either come in or stay out because it was cold and she was letting a draft in the door each time she went in and out. She turned and looked at me and, in all seriousness said, “Mommy, a giraffe is too big to get in the door – silly” Clearly ‘draft’ and ‘giraffe’ in South African to a young child sounds the same !!!! We still laugh about it now – 20yrs later !

  22. Hahaha, I laughed out loud, at the post, and at many of the comments! Made my day. 🙂

    Your kids must have been a constant source of amusement…good on you for remembering to write some of it down!

  23. I’m lovin’ these ‘re-runs’ 🙂

    Thank you!

    I have been reading RD for over 40 years. It was one of the first magazines I ever read and I think you damn well better oughta resubmit ‘most’ of these … haha, don’t forget that they have an online edition, now, too, so 😉

    People NEED these nuggets of happy …

  24. I was watching my precocious granddaughter (age 4) and her older brother. They were watching television while I made dinner. Teasing and arguing escalated into yelling. I’d had a day of it and quietly led her into the backyard and shut the door behind her. I told her she could come back in when she quieted down. A few minutes later I opened the door to a glaring 4 year old …
    Me: Are you finished yelling?
    4yo: I want my mommy.
    Me: Me too.
    4yo: you don’t even HAVE a mommy.
    Me. True, my mommy died.
    4yo: (wide-eyed) Did she get run over by a car??

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