Don’t say anything at all.  Your mother told you that, mine did as well.  Give me a pen, however, I have been known to write polite negative newspaper columns that upset forty year old men living with their mothers and soup kitchen coordinators.

I have apologized, in writing, and actually on the telephone.  For a penny a word, I gave what I was doing a little shake.  It is grueling to do this on a regular basis. Humor writers of penny ante columns in a few newspapers  can get worked over for being a little…shall I say, nasty?  It is 2017,  January hibernation time.  No one is nice.  Go to your local coffee and muffin drive through.  Order something.  Wait at the pick up window and the employee will address you as he/she hands you the wrong car’s food that you are interrupting the painstaking cancer research they are doing inside. Try it, order a banana nut muffin, and get a coffee cake muffin and try to tell the employee how mistaken they have been.  It is easier to drive off, park to look at rush hour morning traffic and eat the coffee cake muffin.

This philosophy might get you employed and keep you employed if you are a kindergarten teacher, as I was.  One day a grandmother in pajamas and a winter coat stormed through a blizzard to interrupt my class.  She was a mad hatter over her grandchild’s  arrival home wearing two left boots that had unicorns printed on the toes.  I showed the woman, gritting my teeth, the coat room full of identical unicorn boots sold at the local discount store at a discount price.  I said, “nicely” that she could forage through the boots to find her grandchild’s matching boot.  I also suggested that she write her grandchild’s name inside the boot, with a permanent marker.  She was noisy doing this task with a dog on a leash and a baby on her hip.

It was a January day, much like this one.  I had a headache and needed caffeine and a Valium.  My own girls had the same darn boots.  The kids sensed weakness in me and like a pack of wolves started to misbehave.  I went over to grandma and lost my pleasant demeanor.  I told her to get the f-word out of my room.  I was reprimanded for this, of course, later.  But, giving her the f-bomb released all of what I hate about January, boots, and decaffeinated coffee.

Later in the year we had, you guessed it, “GRANDPARENT’S DAY”.  The grandparents sat in chairs around the room.  They were dressed for church and had nervous smiles on their faces.  My class came into the room, also dressed for church, and sat where they usually sat.  One of my favorite thorn in my side girls was dressed in a ruffled wonder of a dress with matching bows on both sides of her head.  She sat down slowly and I bit my lip.  Before I could take attendance this charmer stood up and looked all around.  “Who the f-word ARE all these people?”  What could I say that was nice?  I hissed into her ear “They are your f-word plus -ing grandparents.”  She sat down after noticing her grandparents, with a smile and a flounce of the ruffles on her dress.

I went on with our day like nothing untoward had happened.  I did the math.  I said about 2,000 words in that class and for me, only my f-bomb and my student’s f-bomb marred a perfectly polite performance.  I taught sixty eight five year-olds with about the same number of grandparents in both sessions of Kindergarten.  I  fell asleep that night before putting my own kids to bed.