Saturday, June 22, 2013

"Click," I said...

I found a Seatbelt the other day. Not one of those things you use to strap yourself into your car, but a "Seatbelt" only my sister and I understand.

I was born with an incredible sense of direction, and one of my favorite games is to drive around and try to get lost, then find my way back home again. I've done this all over the country, and have great memories of the things I find on these driving adventures. When trying to get home, I usually come out in an unexpected place on a road I know very well, and it suddenly *clicks*, "Oh - I can get here from there!" That joining of ways - an unfamiliar road that links back up with a very familiar area - in that one sudden realization is what I call a "Seatbelt." My sister is the only person, to my knowledge, that knows of this term and its meaning to me. I'm weird like that.

But I said it out loud at the time ("Huh! A Seatbelt!"); and though he doesn't understand me now, I know I'll pass this on to the Munchkin. This got me thinking - with what other bizarre sayings, only germane to me and a few others, will I be filling up his growing vocabulary?

A very good friend of mine, who is an opera singer and the eldest of four girls (as am I) got stuck in a seatbelt (a real one) after a car ride with her three sisters. As the other women chatted and exited the car, she struggled and vented, "I can't get out," but no one heard her. They blithely continued toward the house, and she cried out, "I can't get out, I said!" At which, one of the sisters who had stayed behind poked her head in the car and mimicked, "I can't get out, I said!" Then, "No one's paying attention to my needs, I said!" And thereafter, "I said" was attached to everything. "I'm eating a ham sandwich, I said!" "Turn the channel, please, I said!" "'Bye, I said!"

Well, she told me this story, and I ran with it. I was doing a play at the time, and got a friend of mine in it saying, "I said" after every statement, which she still does to me to this day. When the two of them finally met at my wedding, there were "I said"s flying. The same sister that knows about the "Seatbelt" knows about this, too. And, to my knowledge, no one else uses it. But the Munchkin will. I already tell him, "I love you, I said," all the time.

There are many more examples of my "isms," with which I'm going to seriously either flesh out or mess up his collection of idioms, including, "I wouldn't want it in my wedding" (referring to something that seems generically nice, but isn't to your tastes - from my youngest sister), "Well, the sky is spam" (which is said when someone has spoken what, to you, sounds like complete gibberish, derived from "Well-disguised spam" at a Cincinnati bus stop with the Seatbelt sister), and on, and on, and on.

He probably won't even think these are "weird" sayings, since he's going to grow up with them. And I'm sure we'll discover many more together. I'm just finding it amusing thinking of him being in his 20s, and his friends having no idea what he's talking about when he announces to them that, the other day, he found a Seatbelt on the drive home. 

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