After last week’s Mother’s Day edition of Nostalgia Tuesday in which I admitted that Mom taught me how to swear, I thought I’d follow up this week with the story of another fine and handy skill instilled in me by my mother.

Mom taught me how to lie.

At the time, I think she called it “good manners” or something, but any four-year-old kid knows a lie when he sees one.

When I was four my grandparents lived on a farm out in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. When most people think of Kansas they think of flat land prairie with nothing but wheat fields as far as the eye can see. This is not where my grandparents lived. They had a farm eight miles from the nearest paved road, nestled in a gorgeous river valley in the northeast part of the state. It looked much more like the Texas hill country than the “postcard” image of Kansas people have in their minds. Anyway, that’s more detail than you needed to tell you the point of this paragraph: It was a long freaking drive from Dallas, Texas to Granny’s house for Christmas.

Perhaps inspired by the other recent “demonstrations of my verbal acuity,” Mom took the long drive as an opportunity to teach me that “just because I think something doesn’t mean I need to say it.” Specifically, she wanted to teach me to be gracious and say “thank you” for gifts from my grandmother even if I didn’t like what she had given me. (Y’know, things like plaid pants and ridiculous bowties.)

Perhaps her brainwashing … reprogramming … coaching worked a little too well.

During the present opening extravaganza of Christmas morning, my grandmother brought out a gift for my dad: A new suit. Of course, the suit was on a hanger and wrapped in plastic to keep it clean.

As a four-year-old who didn’t know any better, I knew what I saw: An opportunity to use those acting chops mom had been nurturing during that eight hour car ride. I turned on my brightest beaming smile and shouted…

“OH DADDY! JUST WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED! A GARBAGE BAG!”

Considering how many times that story has been retold around the family, I suppose I also learned an important corollary to mom’s lesson in “manners” that day:

“If you’re going to lie, make it believable.”

WARNING AND DISCLAIMER: This blog post contains words spoken by, but not suitable for, small children. If you’re offended by such language, stop reading now.

OK, everyone else still with me? Good.

It’ll be a couple of weeks before I can scan some new pictures for Nostalgia Tuesday posts, so I figured in the meantime I’ll just tell a few stories instead.

In most families, everybody remembers each kid’s “firsts.” First steps, first tooth, first bite of solid food … and baby’s first word is always a big one. It’s usually “mama” or “dada” or “ball” or something equally cute.

Nobody in my family really remembers what phrase I first uttered, but it was probably something like “car” or “bear” or “doughnut.”

However, there is universal agreement as to which of the seven words you can’t say on television first slipped out of my mouth. There’s absolutely no debate in our family; my first swear word was an emphatically loud “SHIT!”

Anytime there was a gathering of the immediate family and both sets of grandparents were present, you knew it was only a matter of time before one grandmother or the other started laughingly lamenting the day she realized her sweet little grandson had the mouth of a sailor. (Then again, what do you expect when you dress me up like THIS?)

The only debate is that both sets of grandparents would argue as to which heard me say it first. One grandmother claims that the first time I said it was in the local mall. I took off running towards the toy store and did a face plant when I tripped over my stubby little toddler feet. The other swears it was in a grocery store after I dropped a big jar of pickles. As you can imagine, the stories got longer and more dramatic with each retelling, and each grandmother was more and more sure that she heard it first.

As I write this, I have three thoughts about those debates:

1. It looks like I was a pretty sharp kid and had an impressive sense of context. I didn’t use the word indiscriminately, I used it at exactly the correct moments.
2. You have to give my mom credit for keeping a lid on each incident as long as she did. The fact that both grandmothers think they can lay claim to the story shows that mom was pretty darned good at damage control.
3. You also have to give my mom credit for teaching me such a great all-purpose word.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

It’s a little known fact, I was born to be an Abercrombie model.