Chapter 43: Do you know what your first words were?
Originally written October 11, 2021
Oh shit. Let me think …
My first words, at least according to family lore, were “oh shit.”
I’m not kidding. My grandmother claimed — and my mom concurred — that she taught me to say “Oh shit” before I really started talking.
I never really knew why. Probably just because Nana found it funny to hear a baby say “Oh shit.”
Nana was like that.
Basically she loved to cuss.
And she was goddamn good at it.
Had I been born a few decades later, I might have been in this video:
My childhood was full of “Goddamns,” “Hells,” “son of a bitches,” “bastards,” and “shits” from my grandmother.
And when usually she deployed these artfully and for comic effect — though sometimes they were honest exclamations of anger or frustration. (“Where the Hell are my Goddamned glasses?”)
I remember taking a political science class at the University of New Mexico in the early part of this century from former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris. (That was back when my longtime employer, The Santa Fe New Mexican would pay for continuing education of its reporters.)
Although he’s lived in New Mexico for about 40 years, Fred is an Okie through and though, representing the Sooner State in the U.S. Senate back in the ’60s when I was still living there.
One day in class, he was talking about some of the corny crap politicians always say and asked rhetorically, “Do you think politicians really believe it when they say things like that? Hell’s bells!”
Just the way he said it— his timing, his intonation, stretching a two-syllable phrase into four syllables — made everyone in class chuckle.
To me, it sounded like home. It sounded like my grandmother.
I almost wished that my first words would have been “Hell’s bells” instead of “oh shit.”
I can’t resist posting this ad for Fred’s 1964 Senate campaign. I even remember the jingle at the end of the spot:
But while those cuss words I mentioned above were routine in my house growing up, some profanity was strictly taboo.
One day when I was in first grade (at University Heights Elementary School in Albuquerque, where Central New Mexico Community College is now) a bunch of kids, slightly older than me I think, told me to ask my mother what “fuck” meant.
So, after school that day, I did just that.
My mom was shocked at hearing this, even from the kid whose first words were “oh shit.”
She looked at me sternly and said, “That is the most disgusting in the world and I don’t ever want to hear you say that again!”
I didn’t learn what “fuck” meant that day, but I knew that Mom meant business. She rarely was stern with us, especially when we were very young.
I felt ashamed as all shit!
Fuck a duck!
And so, even well into adulthood, I never said “fuck” in front of Mom. I don’t remember ever testing it on my heartily cussing grandmother either.
And though I didn’t purposefully teach this, or other such forbidden language to my own children, sometimes kids just learn things though osmosis.
I was shocked one day when Molly was about two years old. I was driving down Galisteo and some car pulled out right in front of us, causing me to slam on the brakes and exclaim “Oh FUCK!”
To which Molly replied, in her cutest little baby voice. “Oh Fuck!”
I told her that wasn’t a nice thing to say and Daddy shouldn’t have said it either.
That worked for a while. But ultimately I’m pretty sure I failed to protect her -- and later failed to protect her little brother – from the wicked world of profanity.
A closing thought from Benny Bell: