Sometimes something only needs to happen once, but that once is enough to become ingrained it into your lives for years to come. For example the movie lines, "frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" and "go ahead, make my day."
Sometimes memorable phrases can come up in the most innocuous of situations. Years ago one of our friends was in a car accident and broke his sternum. He was at home recovering, but in a lot of pain. The physician had put him on a medication called, "oxycontin" which none of us had heard of back then.
His girlfriend's twenty-first birthday was right as he got home from the hospital. She wanted to celebrate, but he couldn't go out, so we came to his house. We had dinner and I think there was wine (honestly, I don't remember if there was alcohol, but for a twenty-first birthday, I'm guessing there was.) Since our friend couldn't move his arms much, we decided board games would be the easiest thing to do for entertainment that evening.
I decided to go and get some new games and thought I'd picked two winners with the Star Wars version of Trivial Pursuits as well as the newly released Genus Three Trivial Pursuit question card box. I was wrong.
We all liked the Star Wars movies but we quickly discovered we didn't know, well, squat. No one could get a question correct and everyone but our friend, Nate (who was having a happy night indeed on his pain medication) was fed up with our little Trivial Pursuit pieces filled with exactly zero pie-shaped segments. So we moved to Genus Three.
It wasn't long before we decided Genus Three was a typo and that the proper name of, "Genius Three" should have been all over the box with appropriate warning labels. No one could get a question. Even the Science and Nature questions were confounding and elusive. It was about that point that Nate said, "why can't we get a science question like, 'name a shellfish that rhymes with royster.'"
We all started laughing. We couldn't stop laughing. He begged us to stop laughing because laughing was terribly painful to him. I think we gave up games for the evening, but from that point on, a "royster question" means an easy question to those of us who were there that night.
When my children started school, one of the first parents I met was a lady who's last name was Royster. I tried not to laugh, because there's nothing at all wrong with the name, it's only our connotation with the word. She and her husband are very nice and coincidentally, they bought a lot I used to own and sold after the dot.com market correction when I realized I wasn't going to build a house on the land. I've never told them about the special meaning their last name has to me. I'm not sure I ever will.
The Big Boy Update: My son asked daddy today, "daddy, did you like building sand castles when you were a baby?" My husband said, "yes" and then my son said, "me too." This is interesting, because I'm not sure my children at three and two have made any real sand castles. Coincidentally, we are on the way to the beach to visit family for the week. We will have to make some sand castles with my son.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: "My mouth is bwoooooo!" My daughter ate an ice pop that was one of those vivid blue colors. When she was done I told her to go look at her mouth in the mirror. She was very interested and spent a lot of time looking at her mouth, teeth and tongue after she told me about her mouth being bwooo.
Someone Once Said: It's much easier to support a child, than it is to bring one up that will amount to anything
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