We’re out of town the past few days, but a quickie here:
I have a tendency to over-vocabulate. (Big words are fun, especially in conversation — why reach for a five-cent word when there are perfectly good words to be had for a quarter, as the old expression goes? I’m pretty sure that’s how the expression goes.) So when the check-in attendant at the hotel informed me that the side door, while functional, was not totally reliable for entry to the building (card reader acting up), I told my wife that the side door was a “dicey proposition.”
And because my son, who is in kindergarten, soaks up every new word he hears like a black sweater collecting cat fur off the sofa, he immediately pulled me over. “Dad, what’s a dicey proposition?”
Being loaded down with luggage and a soon-to-be-shattered bottle of smuggled wine that I was trying to shoehorn into said luggage, I answered offhandedly: “uh, well, it’s something that’s kind of scary. You know, something you wouldn’t want to use.”
He responded with two words I am learning to dread, because they either mean he has misunderstood me completely or he has understood me perfectly: “oh, okay.”
Later, at dinner, I overheard him leaning in close to his 3-year-old sister to give her a surreptitious warning: “watch out, those green beans are a dicey proposition.”
So, as usual, he’s not wrong, he’s maybe just too blunt.
Which is to say that as usual, I could probably stand to learn a lot from the little bugger. The beans did need salt.
But what really made me laugh was picturing him having the same conversations when he gets back to school in a week. At the lunchroom table, or perhaps in gym. With his classmates who, perhaps, don’t have the affinity and curiosity for language that he does.
“You’ll want to stay away from the mashed potatoes, Tyler. They’re a dicey proposition today.”
“Dodgeball? No thanks. That’s a dicey proposition on a good day.”
My wife keeps asking me what I’m laughing at, and this stuff is really hard to explain.
Anyway.
In related news, since we’re on vacation, I currently smell of Coconut Mint Drop, which is altogether crisp- and creamy-smelling.
Accidentally Inspired 
Bloggable moments often happen when you go on vacation Pav so let’s see what this little sojourn brings.
The link at the bottom of this post – I CURRENTLY SMELL OF COCONUT DROP – is in my book a masterstroke since, as you well know, I nominated this hilarious recount as your top post of 2016.
Ps. The ‘soon-to-be-shattered bottle of smuggled wine’ sounds like a whole interesting story unto itself.
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Not much to tell there, actually. It was a mistake I was conscious of making in the moment and decided to make anyway, which paid off with (predictable) disastrous results. Mad as hell about it because when it happened, I thought we were in a dry county. (Do they have dry counties in Australia?) Which meant not only was I out a perfectly good bottle of wine, but the mistake could not be remedied. Turns out the country is no longer dry and in fact there was/is a liquor store just around the corner, so the only loss was the money for another bottle and the time to procure it.
Still mad about the waste, though. I put it in a pillowcase. A *pillowcase.* What was I thinking??
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That said, yes, some thoughts are bubbling, but who knows if they’re worth sharing or not. (I’ll share them anyway when I’m back in the nest. Ha!)
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