I should preface all this by
saying that groping, under any circumstance, is a crime, those guys are scum,
and it’s almost never, ever something to joke about. Almost. In fact, I can
think of only two examples when it was funny, the first being from a co-worker
in Japan. Listen:
She was walking to work, early
morning, busy street, when she suddenly felt something squeeze at her bosom. Brring brring! went a bike bell ahead of
her. This dirtbag bicyclist zeroed in and swooped down like a red-tailed hawk
on an unsuspecting titmouse. It was such an unexpected occurrence and such a
Death Star-ish shot (one in a million, kid), that she just stood there, stunned
for several seconds trying to piece it together. Brring brring! The whole thing was so foreign, so ridiculous, so dexterous,
that ultimately all she could do was laugh at him.
Now here’s the second…
“Your son just groped me,” Mommy
said, returning from the bedtime ritual.
“Oh, come on, define grope.”
“He stuck his hand down my shirt
and grabbed my boob.”
“That’s my boy!” Wait…
“That’s not funny. You need to do
something about that.”
“Shall I, um, dust for
fingerprints?”
“I’m serious. What if he gropes
someone else?”
A serial gropist? Truth be told,
he had already groped someone else, quite extensively. Me. But where did he
learn that behavior? I haven’t groped my wife in months, and would only do so
in front of the kids under very, very unique circumstances.
I fear this gropage may somehow be
my fault, the culmination of not nipping some nabbing in the bud. It started
with my neck at bedtime a couple weeks ago. I was singing to him, suddenly felt
a gentle caress on my nape. Barry White coming from somewhere. Whoa, who was
putting who to bed here, anyway? That quickly degenerated, though, into ear
tugging, cheek pinching, and a clumsy attempt at an amateur skin graft.
Like my co-worker, I was too
stunned to really react much. He’s not the most touchy-feely kid, but we’d only
assessed that in terms of us touching him. This was the first time he’d put the
moves on us. This was unexpected, foreign. Kinda weird. We had no rubric for
this, no protocol.
But for now, we’re chalking it up
to him just feeling things out, so to speak. Exploring tactilely, with a lack
of tact, much like he does with his wiener in the bath (Dude, I’m sitting right
here!). I think he’s mostly over it; figured out that we all feel pretty much the
same. Some of us with less hair. Fun while it lasted, though. Now kindly stop
fondling your mother, Bub.
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