Disclaimer: This story is told by me, as I alone remember it. It’s possible that none of the events detailed below actually exist in the memory of my family.)
I remember one evening when my brother and I (okay, mostly me) became obsessed with the word “lasagna”.
I was stickering clothing onto a paper doll (actually a paper Maisy the Mouse because I didn’t intend to waste my life playing with “people” dolls), and with each clothing item stuck irreversably on Maisy’s person, I would cry “Lasagna!”
If memory serves, I gleefully coaxed my brother into saying it with me at least once. He’s always been very tolerant.
The situation only escalated when I stuck some underwear on poor Maisy’s head. The combination of underwear, the word and the act of uttering the word Lasagna, and a mildly mutated neocortex all came together in chorus of rainbow colored ponies and stars in my mind. The entire moment was cause for pure, rhapsodic ecstasy. It’s nice to be able to say I’ve experienced total fulfillment at least once in my life.
As a result of that night, or a series of following days when the word was majorly overused, Lasagna caught the attention of my mom.
Instead of acting well within her rights by yelling at me and telling me to never use the word Lasagna out of context ever again because it’s actually NOT THAT FUNNY (even though it is though, like, I mean, use Lasagna out of context sometime at work tomorrow and just see what happens. Like this: “Ralph went totally lasagna the other day when I turned in that paperwork late! He’s such a lasagna.).
Anyway.
Instead of doing that, she did a very wise thing. She called a little family meeting and told a few heartwarming stories of children who had been kidnapped after getting into unfamiliar cars. Specifically, cars driven by people who said pleasant things like “your parents are in the hospital, there’s been an accident, they asked me to bring you to them!” Hopefully you can tell from my tone that I’m not bitter at all. A little traumatization at a young age is always healthy.
After emphasizing the importance of never, ever, EVER getting into a car with a stranger, she turned the tables by making an exception. A very tiny exception. Which was this: If a strange man with stubble and a beer gut and a cigarette pulled his car over near our innocent little selves, rolled down the window, and said “Hey kids, I got some candy in here. Lasagna,” then we would be allowed to get straight in the car without any qualms.
This is because, I suppose, a random stranger of ill intent would never think to say “Lasagna” to lure kids into his car. It was a word so seldom used out of context, by everyone but myself, that it struck my mom as the perfect “password”, a way for us kids to know if someone had been sent by our parents in the case of emergency.
I guess she never thought about the possibility of a kidnapper who might use the promise of a hot Italian dinner as a lure.
I’m sure she did think about the fact that by isolating the word and giving it a negative and secretive context, she would effectively keep me from saying it ever again.
Until now.
Either way, I never was accosted by a kidnapper, and was also never thrown into a life and death situation where I would need to trust strangers, in cars or otherwise. Which is disappointing. Let’s be honest. It’s pretty cool to have a real password with just your parents, to be used only in the direst of straits. And it’s even cooler when that password is “Lasagna”.
(Sorry mom. Now they know.)
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