I’m not absolutely sure when it began, but it appears to be a sort of mental exercise developed and perfected by boys from the age of 5 or 6. I don’t know when, or if, it stops. I’m afraid to ask. It seems to blossom when they are just hanging out, relaxing, killing time.
The dialogue between the boys goes something like this:
“Would you rather be buried in your favorite ice cream or dipped in hot fudge sauce?”
“Well, would you rather have your knees bend the other way or have six eyes?”
“No, no, what if, what if you found 10 snakes in your bed but they weren’t poisonous?”
“No, no, what if your mom only fixed you fried bugs for dinner, and you were really hungry?”
“Would you rather have your feet stuck in cement or your hands stuck in super glue?”
It often gets slimier and more bone-shattering than that, and I finally tell him to knock it off or go somewhere that I can’t hear them. I can handle the gross stuff but not that involving bodily pain. Little boys seem so comfortable with this bizarre mix of silliness and agony. It must be a guy thing, because I find it really unsettling, but their fathers just laugh.
Very occasionally, I get into the spirit of it, if a mealtime isn’t too close at hand.
It isn’t easy to gross out a 7-year-old boy, so occasionally the challenge is too much to resist. As we strolled through Sea World recently, I nonchalantly asked my son and his pals to pet the sea hare in the tide pools, and then told them that my husband had, in fact, eaten one. The simultaneous shrieks of horror that followed this announcement made me want to jump up and high-five somebody.
For those of you unversed in marine biology, the sea hare has the same look, feel and consistency of a giant slug, except they are ocean-going creatures. My husband, famous for his curiosity to taste every food known to man, did once order it in a Chinese restaurant. He admits it tasted dreadful — like mud, only worse. But most of his exotic taste tests have been to his liking.
My son actually takes a cautious pride in the fact that his father not only eats snails but has raised them in our back yard for that very purpose. He has been known to boast that his dad has eaten raw beef, cockles (“alive, alive-o”), dried squid, pig snouts, cow brains and pickles. His friends are invariably impressed. I am invariably nauseated, except for the pickles, of course.
I hope this phase of one-upmanship will pass soon and those overactive imaginations will take a more poetic, perhaps even scholarly, track. Or do they skip right to girls? Oh, don’t answer that.
Jean Gillette is a freelance writer looking back at the fun of raising boys. Contact her at [email protected].
