My teenage daughter Gladiola is in a really cranky mood. Supper don’t taste right, the house is too small, her brother is stupid, and the letter ‘c’ is an unnecessary consonant.
“What? Are you actually picking on the letter ‘c’?” I say, thinking I must have heard wrong.
“Yes! It makes the SAME sound as a ‘k,’” she says, looking outraged. “It’s a waste of a consonant.” Clearly she is furious about this.
I make the mistake of taking her serious. “Cat, corn, candy, church – what about church? That’s a ‘c’ plus ‘h’.”
She ignores me. She is mad at ‘c’s.
“I’ll prove it!” she says. She picks up her phone and calls her grown-up sister Gumdrop, who she must assume is an expert on ‘c’s. She puts the phone on speaker so we can both hear.
“Gumdrop!” she says. “What sound does the ‘c’ make?”
A pause. Then “Sshhh, ssshhhh, sshhhhhh,” from Gumdrop.
Well. I am waiting for Gladiola’s hair to burst into flames. “WHAT?!”
“Unless there’s lots of waves,” Gumdrop says. “Then it’s splash! Splash…”
“Not the sea! The ‘c’!” And Gladiola throws down her phone and stomps to her room. I have to pick it up and explain, “Your baby sister is nuts.”
Kids are getting weird these days. Even weirder than we were.
Two of my sister-in-law Gloriosa’s kids decided they wanted to change their names. That’s a thing they do now. I wish I had thought about that myself. Instead of Modine, I might have picked, oh I dunno – Kim Kardashian?
Now, you got to understand, on Gloriosa’s husband’s side of the family – the side with the money – they are very traditional about names, since they like everybody to believe they are Mardi Gras royalty.
Her husband’s name is Proteus. He is named after his father, Old Mr. Proteus, and her kids are Comus – he’s the oldest – and his little sister is Momus, and then there’s the baby, a little redhead named Flambeau.
Comus walks into the kitchen and tells Gloriosa he don’t want to be Comus no more. Kids at school tease him, especially around Carnival time.
From henceforth onward, he wants to be called “Rex.”
Now, I don’t know what I would have done in Gloriosa’s situation. But she goes along with it, seeing as they don’t already have a dog by that name. And she says, “Okay, Rex.”
Then Momus comes in and says she wants to change her name to “Muses.”
Okay, again.
Flambeau stays Flambeau, thank God. She just learned how to pronounce it.
I hope this name-changing thing don’t spread through the family. I can’t remember anybody’s names now – not even my own kids’. I have got to the point where I call them all “sweetie.”
Mainly because they get insulted when I call them the first name that comes to mind, which sometimes happens to be the cat’s name.
They like to use weird words anyway. Things ain’t cool, they are epic. Stuff like that.
Now, I didn’t do nothing like that when I was their age, because I believed in mortal sin. Everything was a mortal sin. That kept us out of trouble.
These kids obviously don’t believe in mortal sin no more.
Now, back I was a teenager, I had a figure like a mop handle, with hair to match. But if I so much as wore a two-piece bathing suit to go swimming, I hurried up and went to confession for indecent exposure. Because if I happened to drop dead before that, I would wind up Down Below for all eternity.
There were a lot of mortal sins to watch out for. The nuns at Celibacy Academy told us that we should never, never, ever sit on a young man’s lap. But if we had to, if the car was crowded and we were racing away from a tornado, say, then we had to be sure to put a phone book on his lap first.
Well, we don’t got phone books no more. So I got no idea how to decently race away from a tornado.
That’s one of the problems with the world now.
That and unnecessary consonants.
