This week’s column deals with adult themes and issues. If you’re easily offended by a three-letter word synonymous with the human reproductive process, please stop reading now.
I mean it. Stop. Now.
Still here? OK.
“Six.” That’s the word. Well, not “six,” exactly, but a word that’s spelled the same, save one letter.
It’s a word that has created more trouble in my life than any other, and I’m including “tequila,” “algebra,” and “Sister Sulpice,” which is technically two words but still gave me a lot of grief back in fourth grade.
My problems with six can be traced to my parents, as any good shrink could tell you. Mom and pop were enlightened, liberal products of their time, heavily marinated in the Dr. Spock-ish literature of the era and determined to make sure I wouldn’t have to learn about six “on the streets” as had their generation.
So instead of picking up inaccurate sixual tidbits in the school yard and from the half-hidden covers of Playboy magazine at the drugstore (as nature intended) I was subjected to not one, not two, but three books on the subject. These I read, under great duress, as my parents hovered nearby to answer any questions I might have.
If there’s a more nightmarish scenario for a fourth grade kid, I don’t know what it is.
Until the afternoon my folks sat me down with these allegedly educational tomes, I had considered six not at all. I had no questions, I had no interest. (Though both showed up in spades a few years later — thank you Debbie Kowalski!)
It didn’t matter; according to some “expert” my parents had seen on TV, it was time to deliver “the talk.” I was their first child and they were determined to discharge their parental responsibilities, even if the embarrassment killed me in the process.
The books were written with children in mind, but children maybe four years older than I was at the time. Most of what I read I understood not at all, but I will admit to being thoroughly captivated with the illustrations. So much so, in fact, that I think my parents began to have second thoughts about the entire project even as I worked my way toward the final passages.
At some point they started to realize they had delivered into my grubby, grass-stained hands the fourth-grade equivalent of the Kama Sutra. It was an experiment they never repeated with any of my younger brothers or sisters.
I remember almost nothing about those books now, other than the near total mortification which accompanied reading them in front of my parents.
That and one other thing: One of the books described the six act as “feeling a lot like a sneeze.”
To this day, I’m abnormally fond of pepper.
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