You Had To Be There
July 14, 2005

So there we were lying in bed one night before sleep, discussing our travel plans. Well, I was discussing plans; Art Boy was expressing dismay. He's never a happy camper when it comes to leaving hearth and home, and this night he was bemoaning the certain discomfot of foreign beds (ie: any bed on the planet except ours).

Not even private beds in the homes of friends measure up to his exacting standards. But motel beds are the worst. A motel bed we once shared in San Simeon was so hard it was like sleeping on sheetrock. A bed of nails would have been more forgiving.

I remarked that some benighted folk actually prefer hard beds. "Some people put boards under their mattresses," I pointed out.

"Some people eat fur for breakfast," Art Boy grumbled.

I was about to move on to my next cogent point when the 10-second audiotape delay in my brain replayed what he'd actually said.

"They do not!" I exclaimed. "Who eats fur for breakfast?"

It must have just occurred to him what he'd said, as well; he was starting to sputter with laughter. "Yes they do!" he insisted. "Fur with bacon. Fur in a bowl!"

By then we were both laughing, not because it was all that hilarious, but because we just got swept up in the absurdity of the moment. And I'm not talking garden-variety mirth here. In another minute we were shrieking with laughter, wheezing with laughter, gasping, reeling, asthma-inducing laughter, rolling about on the bed in hysterics, weeping buckets. It went on and on. Medical science has not yet discovered the antidote to this kind of implosive silliness. It must have taken us half an hour to get a grip.

We thought we'd regained our senses (such as they are) by the next morning at breakfast. I put some toastable bread on a plate for Art Boy.

"Do you want cheese with that?" I offered, at the refrigerator door.

He decided to go Spartan, and said no
.
"How 'bout some fur?" I suggested.

We cracked up all over again.

Fur for breakfast. Three little words that ought to have nothing in common. Yet strung together, they have all the earmarks of moving into our Pantheon of private verbal shorthand, little mini-mantras that mean nothing to anyone else, but are freighted with meaning for us—however ridiculous that meaning might be.

In pop culture, catch phrases rule the day, from "Where's the beef?" to "Make my day," to "Yada, yada, yada." You can toss these into the conversation and everybody gets it, an affirmation that we're all on the same page, culturally speaking. Phrases like "Beam me up, Scottie," or "We're not in Kansas anymore" are so deeply embedded in the lexicon, they're probably listed in the dictionary (not that anyone would ever need to look them up).

Private verbal shorthand is more personal, since it's usually related to a specific moment in time that you shared with someone else, a moment that can never be recreated, much less explained. You just had to be there. Such expressions might pop out of one's mouth for no known reason (in a million years, Art Boy couldn't tell you what frazzled synapses in his brain linked the word "fur" with the word "breakfast"). Or, like more common catch phrases, they might have been gleaned from another, albeit more obscure, pop culture source.

When I was a kid, my favorite comic strip was Peanuts. I especially bonded with Charlie Brown's kid sister, Sally, who, like me, always dreaded the beginning of the school year. One morning in the strip, Sally was running through the house yelping, "School starts tomorrow! Panic in the Streets!" Ever since, "Panic in the Streets!" has been my expression of dismay over any stressful incoming event.

In the late '60s, some cultural magazine my mom subscribed to ran an interview with cartoonist R. Crumb, just then emerging from the "underground" comix scene in the Bay Area. The article was illustrated with some of his art work, and while it shames me to admit I don't remember the whole image, I do recall that a character was in high dudgeon about something or other. Among the dialogue baloons containing his exclamations of outrage was the phrase "Cancel my rhumba lesson!" To this day, my brother Steve and I regularly make this delaration whenever things go awry, from a malfunctioning phone to the latest malfeasance from the Oval Office.

It's no use trying to rationalize why Steve, my girlfriend Jan, and I all call each other "Ducky," or why my mom and I routinely crack up over the word "bat." You had to be there.

(If you know why R. Crumb's character cancelled his rhumba lesson, please tell Lisa at lisajensen@sbcglobal.net)