Coarse & cuddly?
Little slice o’ life: This evening I came home to find that no one had done anything around here today and I wasn’t in the mood to do a great deal of housework and make a large dinner from scratch. Hot dogs sounded good enough to me. I had a pack of large ones (eight inches or so – insert White guy’s penis joke here) in the freezer, plenty of good, brown mustard, even some beef chili to heat up. I just needed some fresh rolls and some relish. Hey, if you’re going to have hot dogs you have to have the extras. I was lazy enough not to bother chopping up onions, but the rest would be enough.
So, I walked up to a nearby store for some rolls and the inevitable impulse items. A couple of good-natured but hard-drinking guys - the vapors coming off them were strong even when I passed them at a distance of a good ten feet - were deliberating over which which ice cream to buy. (They settled on Moose Tracks, btw., an ice cream with peanut butter-filled chocolate bits in it – I commended them on the choice when they ended up at the counter just as I was finishing up. They said they'd really been looking for Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey -- hmm... maybe they were doing more than just drinking...)
Anyway, while I was in the back of the store, passing from the meat to the dairy section there was a youngish mother, I suppose – thirty, say, though she might have been six years younger and a smoker – and what I took to be her son, who couldn’t have been more than eight and was probably closer to six. He seemed good natured, and was apparently carrying on some running joke with his mom. It was a matter of tone more than anything else. Then, at least twice as she called him to catch up with her she called him – and I want to stress that it was in a perfectly affectionate tone, with no hint of malice – “shithead.”
Hey, maybe I’m making too much of nothing.
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