C tells E, “Time to fingerprint.” E asks, “Why, is there a woman coming?” C nods gleefully, and I hoot. In she walks, a sleepy millennial at 9am, barely a woman, I think. The other day, E was out, and C did the fingerprinting. She was small, 40-ish, and definitely awake at her 9am time.

“You have nice fingers,” C tells her.

“Because they’re little,” I interpret quickly, not wanting C to have any finger harassment lawsuits in the future.

“Yes,” he affirms.

I tell her, “You should see the trouble we have printing big pudgy fingers. Sometimes we’ve had to try five times on a finger before it’s accepted.”

She giggles, accepting the compliment and enjoying the male attention; she’s glowing on her way out from such minimal attention. It’s what comes more easily from non-American men who don’t know how ridiculous our feminist society has gotten since some bogus sexual harassment suits.

A little later, E and I are cutting up, parrying from our diagonally placed stations for serving customers (Have you noticed that “customer service” is essentially slave language for helping the entitled?).

A foreign customer asks, “Are you husband and wife?” (Honestly, there's 16 years between us which looks like a few more than that, because I am evidently not quite shriveling on schedule.)

“No, he just says funny things and I laugh at him. We get along.”

E says, “You're easy to get along with.”

"I am?!" Hunnish astonishment. (That's not what I've been hearing at home.)

Then in a quiet moment, C brings up a village song which is acted out on his phone. He starts to laugh. I look up with a question and a smile. It’s a funny song by a man and a woman who each have their entourage of men and women respectively. It is improvised and clever. He translates for me. She calls the man a puppy. He says that even though she may try to move nicely, she is 100 kilos. She says that if she wins (this singing competition), he will wash her dishes, cook her food, AND wash her sari! He says he would rather beat her than do all that (woman’s work). What I remember is only a fraction but good enough to convey the spirit of the singing. I relate it to Hungarian language and cultural stuff. We put our heads back and laugh like children. Poor E doesn't get the hilarity because he's got American apple pie humor, which is good too, just different. C & I enjoy both kinds. Dave's gotta stick to the pie.

It's like my American mother, except that she lived and had me overseas for over five years, so it surprised me. Once I had a Hungarian friend here who taught me the "horse dick up the arse" curse. It was apt coming from a horde of horseback riding, arrow slinging rabble. It cracked me up, and I shared the humor with my eldest who was a teenager. She practiced pronouncing the sounds and spontaneously shared it with my mother over the phone (Oh G-d help me, how could I not have seen that coming?). My mother didn't get it, to put it mildly. I guess my humor is partly genetic, the part she doesn't share with me. Many years passed before I knew what that curse was which my dad yelled at the dog in Hungarian ("Your mother's ancient p****!"). I think he told me that it loosely translated to "shut up." I am far from an expert on Hungarian curses, but I know there have to be a wealth of these unknown to me and another wealth which the men use mainly among themselves.

The French have an expression which I love, "It's raining like a pissing cow." You'd have to have seen a pissing cow to get the humor. Makes more sense than "It's raining cats and dogs," to me. Maybe Africans say, "It's raining like a pissing giraffe?" Aayepp, saw that one too.

The humor is in the cultural detail and what it says about the people. Puritans or not? PC or not? Horse people? Agrarians? Values? What have you? This is what I've loved about both humor and curses in other cultures.

C softens when he talks to me, sharing about his family and growing up experiences. His wife calls him the equivalent of "daddy," which when spoken by her is an affectionate underlining of his important family role. Spanish speakers, Hungarians do also. Little kids get called "little mother and little father," in preparation for the day they will assume that role as well. I grew up with a sense that it was a sorrowful thing to be unable to have children, something spoken about in softer, pitying tones. Not anymore, at this time, in this country...

Here, it is the ultimate success of a society which has broken down the family to have its members choose not to create their own. I have noticed that I have a larger definition of family and that my definition has been constrained by some around me whose definition is smaller, and I have experienced this more than once. I used to think that it was due to being an only child that this was the case, but no, it’s not. C has told me that now, I am family to him—he can’t help it. He comes from a culture in which “non-family” is called brother, sister, aunt or uncle. Latinos also have a strong sense of family. It’s why everybody in the family with a free schedule shows up at the pediatric appointment. Auntie is holding the patient, conversing with mom. Grandpa is poking the belly of the patient (because dad is working and can’t do it, lol), and an older sibling is standing by him, leaning on his knee.

I came to notice in my 40s that people with something in common with me (because James has posted plenty about dindus who give birth to paychecks), who hadn’t had kids, had lives that were significantly different, not only in the obvious sense but also in terms of their lack of common experience, their ability to empathize deeply, and unfortunately a level of selfishness which child raising often, but not always, scrubs out of you. I wasn't teeming with maturity or courage either, when I became a parent at 25, but I chose the path because I didn't want to only be someone's child forever. I wanted to extend myself as a parent and experience what that meant also.

C told me about how he ran away from home with his college registration money. I guess it was a coming of age experience, of becoming a man, and the subtext for why we want our children to be better than we were, not do what we did. As C said, “I want my son to be better than me, not same.” He's on the verge of house hunting in one of two areas with top-rated public schools. It's often the parent who raised some hell when they were growing up who's harder on their child in hopes of making the kid better than they were. Somehow this has a way of backfiring, that whatever we are compensating for waits for us at the end of that dark parenting alley called adolescence. I once had the hubris to think I could get through it unscathed if only I did things differently. Quite the opposite, though I'm pleased to report that my children are better than me. I'm sure his will be too.