I’m beginning to wonder if I’m spending too much time with my children. I first became suspicious of this fact one evening as I attended a birthday party. The night was young, the moon was high, and laughter filled the air. Since seating was tight, I arose from my chair and said to those around me, “Quack, quack.”
It was one of those moments where the world stopped spinning. The room fell silent. Ice ceased to clunk in glasses, conversation came to a screeching halt, and quickly and surely, all eyes fell upon me. “Quack, quack?” inquired a woman who obviously was not in the know.
“Yeah,” I responded with a rolling of the eye, “I want my seat back.” I mean, duh! You may find this hard to believe, and I’m still struggling with it myself, but I was the only adult in a room full of many who had never heard of calling “Quack, quack” when a person wanted their seat back. And although my fellow partygoers were the ones who were clueless, they all looked at me as if I were the one being fitted for a straitjacket.
Go figure.
Then one fine afternoon, a large group of friends and I were returning to the car from a day at the mall. We all had high hopes of getting the front seat and not being crammed in the back with the packages, so we raced to the car as fast as we could. Some of us were carrying large shopping bags, some were stowing excess weight and some of us had large handbags and we were willing to use them.
Better yet, some of us were smart enough to know that purses didn’t have to be used as weapons if one wanted to obtain the best seat, and I called out in a civilized manner, “I call shotgun!”
Once again, and it was the strangest thing, I’ll be danged if the earth didn’t fall still. Suddenly, everyone stopped running, and wouldn’t you know that once again all eyes fell upon me as my dear friend, Maisy, said to me with a look of confusion, “Girl, you call what?”
Not only did these well-versed and seasoned women not know what calling shotgun meant, but they’d never heard of it and did NOT abide by its rules and let me sit in the front passenger seat.
Apparently they had no formal upbringing. Not only that, they made it obvious that I was the only one who was reared in a civilized manner with people who not only knew the rules of calling shotgun but respected them.
In an attempt to round out a dispute between my sisters and me over who had to clean up at our last family gathering, I rose to my feet as dishes were mentioned and promptly proclaimed, “Not it!”
Now anyone who is anyone should have risen to the challenge and said, “Not it!,” and left one poor and last proclaiming soul to tackle the dirty deed. After all, wasn’t “Not it!” the game of our forefathers? Was it not played out in backyards, school grounds and any time we didn’t want to be the one to get stuck mowing the yard?
Again, I was met with looks of unadulterated confusion. My younger sister looked at me with bewilderment, my brother looked the other way for fear of making eye contact and my father asked me if I had been hitting the sauce.
“Mother!” I exclaimed. “You know you’ve heard of ‘Not it!’ ”
“Honestly, honey,” she responded, “I think that you’re spending too much time with your kids.”
My mind went back to the birthday party and all of the people who looked at me as if I’d just grown a third ear. “There she is,” I had heard some woman whisper to her husband as she dragged him into the room to look at me as if I were a zoo animal.
He plopped down on one of the empty seats that suddenly were all around me and said in a tone of amusement, “Quack, quack?”
They can laugh at me all they want, but I totally bet that man uses it the next time that he wants his seat back.
Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons and the author of the book “Are We There Yet?” You can reach her at www.loriclinch. com.