Lunch Meat

Last night when I got home from work nobody was home so I sat on the porch and relaxed for a bit.  Before long the brother and sister from across the stress began fighting.  The girl is 9 and her brother is 7.  They yelled and pushed each other around like a couple of bull elephants for a few minutes until the sister ran into the house crying.  This left the brother outside alone, pacing the sidewalk while continuing the argument he had with his sister.  He was reenacting their entire conversation, shaking his head and throwing his arms up into the air. 

This situation reminded me of an argument he had with my seven year old son a few weeks ago.  Lunch Meat, as I like to call my son, is a big, strong boy who just so happens to love sodium and msg enriched preprocessed deli meat.  He holds no punches and is very outspoken, thus it’s easy to know exactly what he’s thinking.  He and our neighbor are buddies and, unfortunately, have very similar personalities.  Both are stubborn as can be and refuse to let the other have the last word.  This means most of their play time ends with lots of yelling and both swearing they’ll never play together again.

So one day they were playing outside when, as usual, they got into an argument.  The neighbor stormed across the street and they began hurling insults back and forth at each other like rotten egg bombs.  At first I tried to intervene, but I was enjoying far too much the creativity, yet childish simplicity, of their insults.  Apparently the neighbor is a “stupid butthead who sucks at sports.” I did learn, however, that he is quite fluent in the language of four letters.  This carried on a bit until they both started to lose steam.  Lunch Meat had the last word, leaving his friend with the only option he had left...go after his parents.  “Well your dad…” he began, quickly glancing over to see if I was listening, “is a big, round fatty.”  I couldn’t believe it.  There I was, innocently supervising as Lunch Meat and his buddy were developing valuable social skills when he throws me into the mix.  He had even looked over to make sure I wasn’t listening but when I was, still wasn’t deterred.  I hate to admit it, but I felt a certain closeness to our little neighbor boy that day.  That was the day I learned that he and I are both members of the same club, the Broken Filter Club.