Growing up, my mom called sneakers tennis shoes. I always thought the word sneakers was a dumb word, an East Coast word, like their sodapop that we just called pop. And I guess it's because mom (ironically born on the East Coast) always called them tennis shoes. Anything else sounded like a mistake. To me even my basketball shoes were tennis shoes; running shoes. . . tennis shoes; etc. In fact the only shoes that were not tennis shoes were boots, or dress shoes. Anything you played around in though, tennis shoes.
And i didn't call them "tennis shoes" like two distinct words that invoked pictures of clean-cut men clad in matching white shorts and collared polo shirts, but one word, "tennashoes". The accent was on the first syllable. TEN-nuh-shoes.
It was only when I got older that I even put it together there were actual shoes specifically made for playing tennis and that those shoes were aptly named tennis shoes, and the shoes I was wearing (and referring to as tennashoes) were not necessary the same thing. But i still call them tennashoes to this day, or tennies, if I'm pressed for time.
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I was making lunches for the kids, packing salami sandwiches into plastic sandwich bags labelled in marker with their names markered onto them. Emma began to laugh. A rerun of an old "America's Funniest Home Videos" was on the TV. The videos are always pretty funny. But the schtick BETWEEN videos by the host (now on to greener and schtickier "Dancing With The Stars" pastures) always made the show more or less unwatchable for me. Still, Emma likes it, and who doesn't laugh when some nimrod hits himself in the nuts trying to show off his trampoline prowess, or a kitten launches itself comically at a video camera, or somesuch?
"What happened?" I asked her, zipping her lunchbag and looking up.
She described how one child was pushing another child on a swing. The child pushing got distracted and when the swinging child returned, the pushing child was knocked ass over tea kettle on the ground.
"Kids are dumb," I told her, wondering if she'd take offense to this, or think it was funny.
She laughed harder. "Kids ARE dumb," she replied, and chuckled to herself wryly, apparently excluding herself from the demographic.
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I forgot the third thing I was going to blog about
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