P'diddle

The playful side to Mom was infectious and formative. A triumph of nurture. I have evidence that all three of us siblings were infected, because I still hear my brother and sister use Mom words now and then. I can be hiking Water Dog, absorbed in a cross-country conversation with my brother through the miracle of my AirPods Pro* about some horribly in-depth details of his south-of-market health issues when he’ll ask me if I think goopies will help.

Goopies is a local anesthetic ointment that the rest of the world knows (or more likely, doesn’t know) as Nupercainal*. (Subject-verb agreement deliberate: Despite its terminal letter, goopies is singular.) Mom used goopies on our boo-boos before covering them with plain, flesh-tone bandaids*. That’s all they had in those days, flesh tone. Flesh tone meaning white-people flesh tone, of course. It’s kind of a repulsive term anyway, flesh tone. Eww.

I had a 1982 Oldsmobile Firenze that was flesh tone. I don’t think Oldsmobile called it that, but that’s what it was. Not an appealing color at all. Or maybe it is if you're a caucasian-oriented cannibal. Well, that's enough of that.

On the more palatable side, Mom used to take a dish she called beaniboos to any kind of potluck. Beaniboos are created as follows: Dump a can of B&M* baked beans into an oven-safe dish. Add ketchup, dried onions, brown sugar and molasses in any ratio, then heat the result for any amount of time in a slow (i.e. unspecified low-temperature) oven. Covered or uncovered, depending on how much ketchup you added, either on purpose or by accident.

Splork. Oops! Better cook that longer.

Renie makes beaniboos for summer parties she hosts or attends, and she uses the original recipe. I make beaniboos, too, but I improve them (my stance), doctor them up (Mom’s term), or wreck them (Dad's, Renie’s and Jon’s opinion), by substituting sautéed yellow onions for the dried onions, omitting the brown sugar, and adding roasted or sautéed bell peppers. The recipe for beaniboos is in my handwritten personal recipe book, with a credit to Mom and deviant deviations noted.

Jon doesn’t cook, but when we have people over in the summer he asks, Are you making beaniboos?

This shared Mom-derived vocabulary brings the three of us close. Brings back a little of our mom.

I was dang close to being a legal adult before realizing that the correct term for the vehicle that periodically drove by our house and sucked up leaves from the gutters was not really sweet streeper. Bass-ackwards was in the same category. Likewise, veecy-vicey (sp?).

According to our dad, the origin of Momisms reached back to the 1950s, when he was in graduate school and they were newly married. That rosy decade before kids, when they used to sell their blood to help make ends meet. You could do that in those days.

Mom was reading an article to Dad from the Chicago newspaper, and she pronounced the word political as pol'-a-TICK-el.

Sidebar: Picture a schwa instead of that last e. An upside-down e, don't ya know.

From that pivotal moment, deliberate mispronunciations and downright word substitutions became part of Mom's vernacular, and then ours. Dad didn’t adopt the Momisms—he was too serious—but you could see a crack of a smile or an affectionate shake of the head when she used them. Or when we kids did, for fun or out of ignorance.

This is wholly different from Ed's sumberine and ten hundred, or Max's nagnet, fluffies and hot laba. They came up with those themselves. Our only sin was failing to correct them. So cute!

Did Gnat always pronounce everything perfectly? I think so. Bee?

Mom's playfulness also extended to tap dancing in the kitchen. She sang The Sidewalks of New York, a song from the 1890s, the heyday of Mom's grandparents. During the first four measures, east-side-west-side, she waltzed with her feet while her hands continued washing the dishes. The second four measures, all-around-the-town, featured a shuffle-ball-change and a little kick at the end.

Our maternal grandfather, whom we called Grampie, may have been responsible for transmitting the practice of silly words to his older daughter, our mom. Grampie was an imposing five-foot-tall, stern, once-feared high school physics teacher, who referred to his grandchildren as Jayzie-Wayzie-Inka-Dayzie and Reentie-Kabeentie-Kaboodley-Doo-Our-Little-Upside-Girl. That’s just a sample.

Some of Mom’s terms I’ve passed onto my own kids. The recipes for beaniboos, original and wrecked versions, have been codified and distributed. Sweet streeper would have taken root more permanently if the city had cleaned our street more often. We don’t really use Nupercainal, so goopies, alas, shall probably die with my generation. But before you start writing the American Linguistics Association, remember that the preservation of Native American languages is much more worthy of your attention.

Now, p’diddle, that one will survive. I don’t know if Mom made this one up, and I don’t really know how to spell it, but p’diddle is a good representation of how it’s pronounced.

A car with one operational headlight is a p’diddle. The deal is, the first one to see a p’diddle shouts P’DIDDLE! And everyone else in the car has to kiss them on the cheek. Clearly it was more about winning than about being kissed on the cheek by your brother or sister or mom.

Renie and I came up with a corollary, not endorsed by Mom but practiced widely in the back seat. Sometimes you see what you think is a p’diddle in the distance, and because you want to be first, you call it. Only to find out it was a motorcycle. Or the other fully functional headlight was occluded by another car, or snow. Calling a fake p’diddle meant the other people got to punch you. A highly satisfying corollary.

The first few decades after I started driving myself, p’diddles seemed rare. Very rare. Maybe headlights became more reliable, or maybe I was busy with other things, like grad school, kids, job.

But these days I see a p'diddle at least once a week. Did the reliability of headlights take a nosedive, perhaps a subtle part of Xi Jinping's plan for slow world domination? Or are all those p'diddles a manifestation of increased awareness from my new industrious indolence?

I’m mostly driving by myself, so I generally don't call it aloud. I'm not crazy, you know.

When I see a p’diddle now, I think of it as Mom visiting me. I say, Hi, Mom! And I might wave. Sometimes one headlight is dimmer than the other, and I say, Mom! You almost fooled me, but I saw you. Yesterday I said, Mom! You’re branching out to pickup trucks! Good one!

She’s been gone eleven years.

Sometimes I just say, I miss you, Mom. Thanks for the p'diddle.

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*AirPods and AirPods Pro are registered trademarks of Apple Corporation. If Apple is interested in sponsoring this story site, we@indolenceindustries.org welcome their financial contribution in exchange for additional product placement. And if you're listening, Apple, I must admit I’m a bit annoyed that my AirPods keep falling out of my ears, and I've tried all three sizes of the silicone thingies that came with them. When I cross the bridges over the little streams in Water Dog, I cup my hands over my ears, lest those pesky pods fall into the water.

Nupercainal is a trademark of Dr. Reddy’s Laboratory, Inc., registered in 1934. I would invite Dr. Reddy to sponsor this story site, too, but I don’t honestly think their product will show up again. Though you never know.

Band-Aid is a registered trademark of Johnson & Johnson, who apparently still tries to defend it against being genericized. You can report me to them for using their intellectual property in lowercase without the hyphen. But they’re probably busy right now figuring out how to save the reputation of their covid vaccine, now that its effectiveness against the omicron variant has been impugned.

B&M is a registered trademark filed by Burnham & Morrill of Portland, Maine in 1867. Available today in your finest grocery stores, even though Bush* beans now dominate the shelf space by a wide margin. In my extensive research for this story, I happened upon a local Portland newspaper article that lamented the loss of the aroma of molasses from the steaming smokestacks, now that the factory is shut down. Oddly, the story was interrupted by a tantalizing link to another story titled, Human Remains Found at Mobile Home Fire in Lisbon. Accidental juxtaposition? Maybe so, maybe so.

Bush is a registered trademark of the Republican party.