THREE LITTLE WORDS

Yes, children, those three, magical little words. I was so ecstatic to hear them on his lips, I thought I might faint from joy ...

“Mentally retarded relative.”

The nurse, complete with scrubs, was the one to let me in ... but somehow I didn't put two and two together. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for my ACT tutoring student. He was considerably late. I pulled out my most recent Italian text and started reading. It was quiet for a few minutes, and then the moaning started. Not the good kind of moan, but a sort of Black-Death-victim-in-the-final-throes type moan. I tried to ignore the distressed cries, and desperately avoided the eyes of the nurse, who was at the kitchen counter with a magazine. She caught me glancing at her quizzically.

“Don't worry,” she said sweetly. “He's just trying to go potty.”

The command not to worry had the reciprocal effect, of course – I found myself intensely worried about the substance that had caused the plague-victim's sphincter such Sturm und Drang.

I can't tell you how relieved I was, after a half-hour of sitting at the kitchen table with my tutoring student, stumbling over myself to keep the focus on basic geometery, nigh on tears ... You crazy bastards! My inner monologue yells. Can't you see the Elephant Man or the Fly or whoever you have in there needs a turd-ectomy? No person in their right mind makes sounds like that!

My tutoring student must have read my expression of terror. “Oh, that,” he said. “That's just my mentally retarded relative. You can ignore the sounds.”

The three little words that saved my sanity and changed the course of my life, which otherwise probably would have been quite short ... I was 5 minutes from a violent aneurism.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Peter also told me he loved me last night.

See? Even the soul-less Monty can use the phrase “three little words” in its clichéd sense.

Ha HA! You weren't expecting the overly predictable twist there, were you, kids? Irony abounds!

.

.

.

And no, I am not going to tell you how I replied. It would ruin my street cred.