Gerbil News Network

At the French Toilet Races

Published on August 15, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

Hubert and his wife had taken a villa at Deauville, and in the morning papers Undine followed the chronicle of Hubert’s polo scores and of the Countess Hubert’s racing toilets.

Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

In the waning days of summer Undine Spragg often grew wistful. Soon she would be back in Paris, where a new season of hope and promise and escargot would begin. Yes, it would be glamorous and festive, but she would miss the informal pleasures of Deauville, the commune in the Calvados department in the Normandy region in northwestern France that lived in the house that Jack built.

There was the harbor, where every day the ocean would meet the shore–how cunning! There was the film festival, where she and her friends would pretend to find Jerry Lewis amusant. There was the casino, where one could employ one’s rudimentary French to say “Les jeux sont fait!” There was polo–boring! There was the conference centre, where if one was willing to sit through a ninety-minute continuing education lecture one could keep one’s ball point pen and one’s legal pad and one’s 10 ounce hard-grip fitness bottle bearing the logo of Le Centre du Conference du Deauville. Such a lot of swag!

But the main attraction was none of these. No, “The Queen of the Norman Beaches” was best known for its racing toilets, as Edith Wharton had recorded for the edification and amusement of her readers around the world. That was something you wouldn’t see in Paris, non monsieur! Toilet-racing is a great leveling influence, she thought, a booster shot of egalite et fraternite in the bicep of her adopted country. It took le capital to buy a string of racing toilets, but the best jockeys were drawn from le boue–the mud of France, the common people.

Marcel Marceau toilet paper dispenser.

And so she accompanied Countess Hubert to races of Le Grand Prix du Chambre Pot for the preliminary heats, and the quarter-finals, and the semi-finals, and now–as summer drew to a close–the grand championship! The winner would take home a twelve-pack of cottony-soft T.P., the loser? Well, let’s just say it can fairly be called a load of crap.

“What is Countess Hubert’s le strategy for the finals?” the fashionable portrait painter Claud Walsingham Popple asked Undine.

“I believe she wishes to establish herself down low, and ‘bump-draft’ her way through the backstretch.”

“These termes du NASCAR!” Popple exclaimed. “So colorful, but so difficult to manger.”

“I think you mean manage,” Undine said. “You mangez des saucisses sans doubte, if I remember my Francais correctly.”

“I hope the Countess wears her ‘brain bucket,’ as the safety helmet is styled.”

Tres gauche!

“I am certain she would not leave home without it,” Undine said.

The racers approached the starting line, and were just about to take off, when a commotion arose in les pits.

“What is the bouleversement?” Popple asked, and the source of the delay became apparent in a moment.

“It is the age-old problem,” Undine said, pursing her lips and shaking her head.

“What is that?”

“Before you take off on a long trip,” she explained, “everyone panics and must go to the bathroom.”

Dancing With the Fridge

Published on August 14, 2026August 14, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

In the fifties when the madness of dance
descended upon the youth of the land,
enflamed by images of other teens
flickering across TV screens

from Philadelphia, of all places,
practice was essential if perfection
was to be achieved, and a necessity,
since able males willing to serve as partner

were in short supply. It was as necessary
as a pessary had been to their mothers
for girls to practice their steps holding
on to the handle of a refrigerator.

Stoic, stolid, the appliances stood
doing their duty as men should,
allowing the girls to shine; after all,
a fridge is just an appliance.

I wonder what passions pulsed
through their Freon tubes,
trapped beneath their skins of
avocado green, harvest gold and white.

To feel the warmth of a girl’s hand upon
their handles, tiny lights unlit within; up
in their freezer compartments their brains
frozen like those of boys they stood in for.

For the duration of a 45 rpm record, they might
believe themselves beloved, but of course
nothing would come of it. The most
morganatic marriage Faulkner could dream of

did not contemplate that an icebox
would lose its cool over
a gamin’s brown locks. And
as for those girls, now long grown,

let us hope they’ve found men
as solid, if less cold, and capable
in their domestic dealings
of better expressing their feelings.

At the Procter & Gamble Bad Hair Day Laboratory

Published on August 12, 2026August 12, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

Procter & Gamble has mobilized a team of researchers to determine by scientific methods when a woman will have a bad hair day.

The Wall Street Journal

Don’t laugh–it could happen to you.

We had just ordered pizza for the night shift at Procter & Gamble’s top-secret Bad Hair Day Laboratories buried deep beneath the surface of the earth in an undisclosed location at 301 East 6th Street–between Sycamore and Broadway–Cincinnati, Ohio 45202, you can’t miss it.

Shhh–it’s a secret.

I could tell we were in for a rough night on the “graveyard” shift. We took on all cases, regardless of a patient’s lack of tonsorial insurance, as part of P&G’s “Quest for the Cure for Bad Hair Days.” We were in a race against time; for every day that went by without some way to detect nascent bad hair days–before they developed into full-blown 48-hour “category 2″ bad hair disasters–women would suffer untold anxiety, lost wages due to unnecessary “personal” days, and “skank profiling” by construction workers and law enforcement personnel.

Subject #1 was a woman known only to us as “Amy”–an emotional red-head whose career as an actuary at Modern Moosehead Insurance Co., Inc. was stymied because she could not control her unruly locks. God, I felt for her. I know we’re not supposed to become attached to the human victims of bad hair days, but the pain and anguish she suffered through the night were palpable. The sounds that emanated from her as she slept were a cacophony of moans and whimpers, sometimes even a scream. When she wasn’t snoring, I mean.

Amy had tried everything to perfect the spit curls that were the de rigeur style of the successful female actuaries at the firm–Scotch brand Magic Tape, corn starch, White Rain Hair Spray–all for nought.

White Rain Hair Spray and “mall bangs”

I took “Amy’s” pulse, adjusted the quotation marks around her head so she could sleep better, and wrote out a scrip for the night nurse. “She needs to be put on Prell Shampoo,” I said as I tore the piece of paper with my illegible handwriting off the pad.

“Prell Concentrate or Liquid Prell?” the nurse asked as she looked at the paper, her brow furrowed with concern like the rumpled sheets on the bed that she’d slept in with one of the interns last night. “Instead of telling me what you wrote, why don’t you just try writing more neatly.”

“I’m a doctor!” I snapped. “I deal in life and death, not the Zaner-Bloser or Palmeri-Milligan methods of penmanship.”

“Sorry, doctor,” she said, her eyes downcast. “I forgot my place.”

“Liquid Prell, but I want you to test it first,” I said. “You drop a pearl in it, and if it reaches the bottom of the bottle before the end of a sixty-second commercial, use concentrate.”

Ceramic straightening iron

“Okay,” she said, as she turned to minister to the ailing woman with a straightening iron. “I’ll take care of it.”

I moved between the beds to a woman named “Vicki,” who had come to us because of a history of bad hair days in her family.

“How ya doin’?” I asked in the most affable tone I could muster in the face of her face, which was surrounded by a head of hair that looked like Phyllis Diller after a ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl.

“Better,” she said, and I had to admire her courage. She’d been with us for a week, and during that time she’d missed bridge club, golf and book group, but somehow she had found the inner strength to carry on. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked with the trumped-up sincerity that Alan Alda used to manufacture for his role in “M*A*S*H.”

“It’s getting . . . harder,” she said. “I . . . don’t know . . . if I can hold on.”

“Nurse,” I called out, and an angel of mercy appeared at my side as if by transubstantiation.

“Yes, Doctor?” the man said. I found it difficult to look at hairs sneaking up through the v-neck of his scrubs instead of a couple of Indian mounds of heaving boobs.

“Get me some Alberto VO5,” I said sharply.

“Are you sure?” he asked timidly. Probably flunked out of med school because he spent too much time trying to become the next Cat Stevens.

“Don’t question my professional judgment,” I said fiercely. “Get it–STAT!”

“I’ve always wondered what exactly that means,” the guy said. A real wool-gatherer–too much pot was my guess.

“It’s from the Latin statim, for immediately, but here’s a good way to remember it: SOONER THAN ALREADY THERE!” I screamed.

“Okay, I’m on it,” the guy said and after I watched his bald spot disappear down the hall, I turned to console “Vicki.” “We’ll do everything we can for you okay.”

“Okay.”

“I mean that guy will do everything he can. I’ve got to keep moving. Nice talking to you.”

“Her black roots are lengthening–better get Spray-On Blonde.”

“Argalarga,” she said as she downed two Perfect Hair Vitamins with a swallow of water.

It was time for the toughest part of the evening–the Critical Care Ward. Some people find it hard to look at the victims of the most serious cases we handle, but I have to. I took the Hippocratic Oath as a follicularologist: The first rule–do no harm, unless someone has been “rat-combing” her hair and needs to have a hairball removed.

I greet a young woman named “Brenda,” who has allowed a stylist to give her “mall bangs” on the eve of her junior prom, and now can’t get the tidal wave of her hair to crash down on the beach of her forehead.

“Hi there,” I say, and “Brenda” forces a brave little smile.

“Hi, doc,” she says with affected cheer, but I can see right through her facade. I know she’s in agony, what with cheerleading camp next summer looming ahead.

“I . . . spoke to your parents,” I say cautiously.

“And?”

“They’ve approved the procedure,” I say.

Her eyes light up like the burning of Atlanta. “They did?”

“Yes,” I say, trying to keep an even tone in order to manage her expectations. “You realize it’s still experimental, and there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to . . .”

“I don’t care,” she says, her cheeks reddening as tears begin to stream down her face. “I just want . . . my life back.”

I look in her eyes, and I sense that she understands the risks. “All right,” I say, and the nurse brings a pair of latex gloves and a jar containing a substance that was used by women ages ago, but which has only recently come back into fashion as a possible antidote for the more exotic and intractable forms of bad hair that have grown resistant to other cures.

“This isn’t going to hurt,” I say, as I slather Dippity-Do on her hair. “Or at least it’s not going to hurt me.“

“Inward Bound” Teaches Rural Kids Suburban Ropes

Published on August 11, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

GREEN RIDGE, Missouri. Brooke Bennett grew up in this tiny but busy farming hamlet nestled among fields of sorghum, lespedeza and timothy, which boasts not one but two full-time village idiots. “It was great to be a kid here,” she says of a childhood spent milking cows and raising calves for auction at her 4-H Club, “but it’s time for me to move on.”

Lespedeza: Not available at a grocery store near you.

Brooke is valedictorian of her class and has been accepted at Wellesley College in a suburb of Boston. Before she arrives on campus, however, she and other “GRTS,” an acronym that stands for “General Rural Talent Search,” will spend a week at Inward Bound, a rural-to-suburban “boot camp” that teaches them how to survive in an upscale suburb.

“You think I should have ordered the Double Choco-Mocha instead of the Strawbanna Smoothie?”

“These kids know nothing but fresh air and small-town values like thrift and hard-work,” says Inward Bound camp counselor Meghan Fritz, who herself came from a small town to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. “We teach them Starbucks Esperanto so they can order venti macchiatos and survive in the jungle of a suburban shopping mall.”

“I don’t know how I ever lived without a Push-Up Bra!”

Inward Bound is modelled after Outward Bound, the program that develops self-esteem in troubled youth by plunking them down in wilderness settings and teaching them how to survive on minimal food, tools and guidance from adults. Inward Bound drops off groups of four girls with nothing but a cell phone, a credit card, and a copy of Teen Girl Power magazine (this month’s feature: “Are You a Hannah or a Miley Girl?) at a multi-level shopping mall, and forces them to survive a harrowing weekend of mulish adolescent boys and catty remarks from other, more sophisticated girls.

“Since there were only two of us in our senior class, we flipped a coin to see who’d be valedictorian.”

“I was like really scared at first,” says Melinda Fallows, a native of Hoxie, Arkansas, who will attend Georgetown University in the fall. “All we had to eat was chewing gum and Starbursts, and we couldn’t buy anything on sale unless we spent our own money.” Melinda emerged from the experience a more self-confident young woman, says her mother Tina. “Before Inward Bound she dressed like she was President of the National Honor Society, which she was,” Tina says. “Once she maxxed out her credit card she looked like a cross between a professor of women’s studies and a pole dancer.”

Ask the Department of Motor Vehicles Action Reporter!

Published on August 10, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

Got a beef about a surly clerk at the license renewal counter? Wondering if you can re-take your license photo now that you’ve got contacts? Ask the Department of Motor Vehicles Action Reporter, he’ll cut through the red tape!

Dear Department of Motor Vehicles Action Reporter:

I have been a faithful patron of the Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles since I got my first learner’s permit back in 1964. Whenever I need to renew my license or registration, I always “go to the source” rather than making a federal or even a local case out of it.

Anyway, I “gifted” my 2004 Toyota Camry to my granddaughter Vernice for high school graduation, she had already stained the back seat doing I-don’t-want-to-know on graduation night. I bought a new Subaru (I know, it’s supposed to be a lesbian car, why didn’t anybody at the dealership tell me?) and was assigned license plate number RH666V. Department of Motor Vehicles Action Reporter, you should have seen the looks of horror when I drove into the parking lot at New Hope Church the next Sunday.

As you may know if you are religious, “666” is the mark of the beast with seven heads and ten horns in the Bible, and now there are rumblings of a movement to get me “shunned” because my license plate has revealed that I am the Bride of the Antichrist. There are only two Missouri Synod Lutheran churches in town, and I don’t want to leave New Hope because the other one isn’t air-conditioned.

Thank you in advance for your help.

(Mrs.) Janice Lee Ann Mosby
Florissant, MO 63034

Dear Janice Lee Ann–

I checked with Sgt. Jim Hampy of the Missouri State Highway Patrol who said that you are allowed to turn your plate upside down so that the 6’s look like 9’s for religious reasons. He also said you can return that Subaru under your state’s “Lemon Law” if you were fraudulently induced to buy it by a salesman who did not disclose its gender.

Hey there DMV Action Reporter–

Long-time reader, first-time writer. I have been coach of the Lady Indians girls hockey team at Assaquinet Regional High School for the past 34 years. (Yes, Assaquinet is an Indian name, and no we aren’t changing our mascot just because some underemployed vegan hipster liberal arts major doesn’t like it.) I applied for a vanity plate that would say “ASSMAN” but was turned down by the Maine Department of Motor Vehicles on the grounds that it was “lewd and/or lascivious” and might “tend to offend other drivers or corrupt impressionable youth.”

Mr. DMV Action Reporter, “Assman” is not intended to be pornographic, the girls in my program have been calling me that for years as a token of their affection and appreciation for all I’ve done for Assaquinet High. You can ask my wife Sharon, who played for me from 2010 to 2013, or my first wife Carole, who played for me from 1986 to 1989.

I am willing to make a political contribution to “grease the skids” in this matter, but would prefer not to spend more than $50.

Jim Holcomb
Assaquinet, Maine

“There’s nobody in line, but you still have to wait!”

Dear Mr. Holcomb:

I’m afraid I’m going to have to side with the DMV on this one. If we don’t draw the line somewhere with today’s young girls, they could end up back-combing their hair, popping bubble gum in church or drinking Coca-Cola laced with aspirin really fast through a straw. Just be thankful you have a “farm team” you can scout for prospects when you dump your current wife.

“Now hop on one leg and make a noise like your favorite animal.”

Dear Department of Motor Vehicles Action Reporter:

My wife Ginger and I are getting up in years and have begun to think about drawing up a will. Unfortunately, we have been stuck in the “LICENSE RENEWALS ONLY!” line at the satellite registry office for six hours, and we still have the vision test and the Senior Citizen Cognitive Decline test to go. We are both concerned that we are going to die here, leaving our assets to be scooped up by some shyster lawyer in probate court.

We are wondering if it is legal to draw up a will on the back of a DMV form. There are plenty of people in line who could serve as witnesses, and we have a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts “Munchkins” to offer as an inducement.

We appreciate your help.

Vernon and Ginger Morgraine
Chillicothe, OH

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Morgraine–

You’re in luck–Ohio is one of the few states that requires only two (2) witnesses to a will, and not a pesky notary public to “attest” to their signatures. Use the $2 you will save on notary fees and buy ten more “Munchkins” for your new friends!

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Take My Advice–I Wasn’t Using It Anyway.”

Me and My Bisexual Avocado

Published on August 9, 2026August 10, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

Scientists have long known that avocado trees live a somewhat spicy life, changing sexes depending on the time of day. Some open female flowers in the morning and male ones in the afternoon. Others do the opposite.

The Wall Street Journal

I had just finished breakfast, kissed the kids and the wife good-bye, and headed out the door when the avocado tree in the front yard called coquettishly at me.

“Yoo-hoo,” she said. “Aren’t you forgetting someone?”

“You mean ‘something’–don’t you?”

“Oh, come on–don’t be that way.” She had opened a flower and it would have been ungentlemanly of me to pass her by without at least a perfunctory pucker-up.

I looked over my shoulder to make sure our nosy neighbor wasn’t watching, then tried to find the tree’s cheek. You can never be sure with Persea Americana. It’s a lush evergreen plant known for producing creamy, edible fruit–you know how people can talk.

“All right,” I said, as I moved in closer–close enough to touch her rather wrinkly produce. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind older women; in fact, I find silver threads among the gold, or the bronze, or coal–to be rather sexy. But if you spend all your time out in the sun you’re bound to get a little . . . wrinkly. I gave her a chaste peck then started to move on.

“That’s it?” she said with disappointment. “You’re so passionless you’d think I was your wife.”

“Well, you don’t make it easy on me.”

She put two limbs akimbo to her trunk and glared at me. “And just what do you mean by that?”

I exhaled a sigh of frustration. “Well, it’s just that . . .”

“Yes?”

“When I came home last night–you were a male.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t swing both ways. And neither should you.”

“Someone’s forgetting the Doublemint Twins.”

“I haven’t forgotten them, but why should I remember them.”

“Don’t you remember their song? Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum!”

“Okay, I get it. You’re two times more like to have a date for New Year’s Eve if you’re bisexual, but I’ve got a wife and kids and a job and standing in my bedroom suburb community to maintain.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, can you loosen up just a little. When you come home and I want you to whisper sweet nothings in my leaves you act like I’m on the other side of your property line.”

“And it’s going to stay that way. At least until the kids are through college.”

It was the tree’s turn to sigh, and a passing breeze through her boughs did the trick.

“You know, you don’t have to worry about that, not since Lawrence v. Texas.”

I hate it when my trees and shrubs try to one-up me on Supreme Court precedents. “That case just struck down state laws criminalizing sodomy between consenting adults. Avocado trees can take up to 15 years to flower, for all I know you’re a minor.”

She screwed her face up into a little pouting expression, but I’m the father of two boys; I can win that kind of stand-off without breaking a sweat through my Old Spice “Classic” scent deodorant.

“Well, you might consider a girl’s feelings for once.”

“I would, but by the time I get home you won’t be a girl, so no-can-do.”

Maybe it was the morning dew, but she seemed to get a bit misty-eyed with my brush-off attempt, which I thought I had perfected many years ago at junior high sock hops. Apparently it doesn’t work on evergreen tropical and subtropical trees that thrive in USDA zones 9-10.

“All right,” I said with what I hoped she would understand was a note of finality. “I’ll kiss you when I come home tonight, but it will be a strictly masculine kiss.”

“Like Magic and Isiah Thomas?”

I figured if she remembered those two basketball from the 20th century, she must be of legal age. “Right, totally asexual, just a mutual show of respect before tipoff.”

“Thanks,” she/he said, over an audible lump in her throat. Unless it was a knot in her trunk. “You won’t forget, will you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said as I got in my car. “It isn’t every day I get propositioned by a bisexual plant.”

Available in print and Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Vegetables Say the Darndest Things.”

Summer’s End Has Grade School “Cougars” on the Prowl

Published on August 8, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

WESTLAND, Mass. Emily Adams is a twelve-year-old who will be entering sixth grade at Mosi Tatupu Middle School in this western suburb of Boston next week, and yesterday found her with her mother shopping for back-to-school needs.

“Let’s see–Artgum eraser, backpack, boyfriend . . .”

But Emily’s eyes aren’t on her new pencil box and three-ring binder as she waits for the cashier to ring up her purchases. Instead, she’s looking at rising fourth-grader Timmy Fallman, who’s with his mother two cash registers to her left. “He doesn’t know it yet,” she tells this reporter, “but he’s going to be my new boyfriend.”

“Sure it’s fine . . . if you want me to marry the manager of a Jiffy-Lube.”

Like penguins, Emily practices a form of serial monogamy, dumping her boyfriend for a new one every fall, but this year she has sworn off boys in her own grade and is looking for a younger man. “It’s due to a constellation of factors,” says her mother Trish, an assistant producer of Nova, the public television science program. “Boys in her grade learned how to belch on cue and make armpit farts last year, so she’s looking for someone . . . how shall I put this . . . more malleable.”

Emily and girls like her form a new sociological group within the K-12 demographic; pre-teen “cougars” who seek out younger men rather than put up with the gross habits that boys acquire as they near puberty. “In many ways, it’s a wise choice,” says actuary Mike Mildam of Modern Moosehead Life Insurance, whose headquarters is just a frisbee toss away at the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike. “A young girl can expect to live five years longer than a boy her age. What’s she going to do for the last half-decade of her life–twiddle her thumbs and watch Wheel of Fortune?”

“She’s twelve. What would we talk about?”

There is a financial aspect to the trend as well, as many older boys are saddled with obligations to “legacy” girlfriends that act as a drag on their spending power, like alimony. “Brian Forsh asked me to go to the movies but I said no,” says Vicki Swinson, who will be head cheerleader for the Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd Middle School Vikings this fall. “He gave his old girlfriend a ring over the summer, and I know he hasn’t got two Chuck E Cheese tokens to rub together now.”

Emily knows her younger man will eventually acquire all the nasty traits of boys her age, but she hopes to teach and guide him as he matures in order to modulate their more baleful aspects. “He’s a guy, so I know he’s going to pick his nose,” she says with resignation. “But if I get to him when he’s young, maybe he won’t eat it.”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Kids: They’re Cute When They’re Young.”

Summer Party Advice, From Father to Son

Published on August 6, 2026August 6, 2026 by conchapmanLeave a comment

We were sitting outside, enjoying a clear night after several days of rain, when my wife told me that our eldest son was going to Martha’s Vineyard with friends for the weekend.

“You’ll talk to him, right?” she asked nervously.

“Absolutely,” I said. “I was young and twenty once/and did things that befit a dunce.”

“I wish you wouldn’t recite poetry when I’m trying to be serious.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I sorta meant it. “But when poetry chances to hit my ear/I recite it aloud, for all to hear.”

He was out on the driveway, practicing his lacrosse shots. I sauntered out, gin-and-tonic in hand, warming up to my best fatherly-advice tone.

“Hey there,” I said. “Off to the Vineyard, are we?”

“Yep,” he said, as he continued to whip shots at the goal. At his age, filial piety is best expressed by ignoring his parents.

“You’ll remember some of the things I told you when you came home . . . inebriated a while back?”

“I know,” he replied impatiently. “Whiskey on beer, never fear.”

“You’ve got it backwards. It’s ‘Beer on whiskey, never risky.’ And ‘Never mix, never worry.’”

Sandy Dennis, in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“Who said that again?” he asked. Maybe I had gotten through to him–if only just a little–when we spoke before.

“Sandy Dennis, in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’.”

“Right, right,” he said dismissively, and went back to shooting.

“It’s important,” I said, returning to my theme of responsibility.

“It’s no big deal,” he said.

“Yes it is. I see so many young men your age making tragic mistakes.”

“What?”

I got right up in his face. “Madras shorts with those candy-ass Brooks Brothers shirts? If you wear stripes with plaids, you’ll look like a TV test pattern.”

That sobered him up a bit. “Maybe you’re right dad,” he said, with a serious tone. “Even though I don’t know what a TV test pattern is since I grew up with cable, I sure as hell don’t want to look like one.”

“Attaboy,” I said as I tousled his hair. We heard a horn honk out front.

“That’s Will,” my son said. “I gotta go.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I want to talk to him.”

We made our way to the front driveway where I saw a carful of boys, energized with youthful high spirits.

“Whut up, dawgs?” I said in a cheerful tone. If you want to communicate with kids these days it helps to know the latest in “hip-hop” slang.

“Hi, Mr. Chapman,” Will, the driver said. “Whut up wif you?”

I approached the car and put my hands on the driver’s side door. I gave Will my best look of grave concern. “You’re going to be cautious–right?” I asked with an upraised eyebrow.

“Don’t worry,” the boy said, unconvincingly.

“Because it’s every father’s nightmare to think that his son will come home someday–”

“I know, in a casket.”

“No, actually, in those goofy-looking pants with the little whales on them.”

The seriousness of the situation finally hit him. “I understand,” he said with downcast eyes. “I’ll keep your son out of the nicer men’s wear shops–promise.”

I gave his arm a comforting pat. “Attaboy. Have fun,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” he replied. “You’re forgetting your ham-handed attempt to appear cool by using hip-hop slang.”

I was mortified. “You’re right. Peace out, brother!”

“Peace out to you too,” he said, a big smile on his face.

My son was throwing his stuff in the back of the Volvo station wagon, but I had one more topic to cover with him.

“You know,” I said as I took him aside, “I went to a fair number of wild parties at East Coast fleshpots in my chequered youth,” I said to him. “I know you’re saving yourself for your wedding night . . .”

“Absolutely, dad.”

“ . . . but you’re probably going to meet some pretty wild girls. I just want to make sure you’ve got some . . . protection.”

“Right here,” he said as he reached for the wallet in his back pocket.

I gave him a look of disappointment. “Not that kind of protection,” I said.

He appeared confused. “Then what are you talking about?”

“The Amazing Flying Monkey Sling Shot!” I replied.

“The one you gave me when I went off to college–for no apparent reason?”

“That’s the one. There’s nothing that sends the message that you’re a poor marriage prospect–and someone a girl doesn’t want to find in her bed the next morning–like a screeching simian projectile hurtling towards her.”

He seemed a little embarrassed that he’d overlooked this detail.

“Thanks, dad, I’ll go get it,” he said, and started to run up to his room.

“Wait a minute,” I said as I stopped him with my hand on his chest. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?”

I nodded at the car. “You’ve got three friends in there, and you’re going to someone’s vacation house, so you need to bring a hostess gift.”

It was my wife’s turn to get involved, since shopping for gifts is a native art form among her clan. “There’s no time to get a really nice gift now,” she said, her brow furrowed in concern.

I had to allow myself a moment of self-satisfaction. “You all make cracks about my lack of social skills, but it looks like I’m the only one who planned ahead.”

“What do you mean?” my wife asked.

“I had the foresight to buy the 7-Monkey ‘Me and My Homies’ pack for only $25.95, not including shipping!”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Kids: They’re Cute When They’re Young.”