Growing up with false accusations

Where people would accuse you of things that would never have occurred to you to do, and then try to make you look like a ‘bad guy’?

My dad used to get *incredibly* bent out of shape if I ‘showed him up’ intellectually, to the point where he once called me out on it in front of entire extended family gathering.

I think I was 11 years old at the time.

My family loved playing word games, and was very competitive. I was not so competitive, but *did* love word games, mostly because I was better at them than I was at things like cards, which were the *other* family favorite (I rarely ever played those games).

The other part of the back story is that my dad, from as early as I can remember, sort of ‘fed’ me words – I’m still not sure why, though we were both voracious readers, and I got the reputation early on in my family for being the ‘go to’ person for how to spell or define something. I think I became kind of a ‘thing’ with my dad to see if he could find a word I didn’t know.

So he’d sort of ‘collect’ words to test me on – things he’d hear at work or wherever, and bring them home to see if I knew them.

Between this and my natural affinity for words (I’ve always liked them, liked using them and playing with them and understanding them), I developed a pretty ferocious vocabulary at a fairly young age. Which I now tend to use less because I’ve been accused *way* too many times of ‘showing off’, which takes all the fun out of it (sad face.) I guess I wish I could hang out with more people who liked words as much as I do and who are neither intimidated nor need to compete about who ‘knows more’, but who just *like* words and find them fun to play with.

Sigh.

Anyway, this particular time I was telling about, we were playing a game called Password (a little bell is ringing at the back of my mind, signaling that I may have told this story already. Oh, well - *shrug*).

Password is where two people make a list of words together that are to be guessed at by giving one-word ‘clues’ to the other players. You give one clue to your teammate(s), and if they don’t get it, it’s the other team’s turn. You go back and forth until somebody guesses the word. And of course there’s a certain amount of strategy to it – you try to give a clue you think your team is likely to *know* and ‘get’, and if you’re pretty sure you can’t do it with one clue, then you want to force the *other* team to ‘give it away’.

So this one time the word was ‘spider’, and I was teamed with, I think? my grandma? (dad’s mom) who was quite the brilliant wordster herself, and she and I had a kind of almost magical affinity when we played this game sometimes.

Anyway, I got to give the first clue, so I said, ‘arachnid’, it being the most obvious, one-word clue I could think of.

Of *course* grandma got it, how could she not? It was a sinker.

Dad? came totally unglued – read me the riot act, up down and sideways, that I was ‘being a jerk’, ‘trying to make him look bad,’ ‘showing off.’

My GOD. What the HELL was his PROBlem? I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad go off this way before.

Maybe it was because it was his mom? and she’d always made him feel like an idiot? Never thought of that before.

Well. Anyway, he was TOTALLY out of line. I was fucking ELEVEN YEARS OLD, for cryin’ out loud. And besides, this was THE SAME GUY who was always BUILDING my vocabulary, every. single. DAY of my LIFE. Why was he suddenly turning against me? I didn’t get it.

Reminds me of another time, we were driving on the local university campus, and there was a street sign with the name, “Pend Oreille”.

Now, my dad, always the joker/goofball, saw it and said, “Pend O-re-ill”.

I laughed, and looked at him to see if he was joking.

Nope. My dad looked flushed and angry.

Oops – stuck my foot in it again.

“But – DaaaaaAAAad, that’s pronounced ‘Pond O’ray’. Didn’t you *know* that???”

He just sort of fumed, didn’t really say anything, if I remember right.

Jeez. The number of times my parents breezily, casually, off-handedly HUMILIATED me in front of other friends and family – you’d think since they were so good at

DISHING IT OUT

that maybe they could TAKE A LITTLE on the chin and not freak about it.

But NOoooo.