(Warning: This is slightly a little bit A LOT racier than my usual stuff, so don't say I didn't warn you.)
Has anyone ever asked you how your kid is going to learn about sex if they don't go to school? Well, several people have asked me that and now they'll get an answer. Mind you, I think it's a pretty stupid question, because the human race managed to keep itself stocked just fine way before there were schools, so the little nippers must have been learning about the birds and the bees somehow. But now, apparently, we don't feel that parents are capable of explaining how to reproduce and, more importantly, how not to reproduce, and also what all of that has to do with love, respect, responsibility and all like that.
Well, at least in my case, my restaurant karma, which you may remember from a couple of other articles, brought sex education right into the dinner table conversation, just like they tell you to do in those public service announcements on TV. By the time we were done, we just about had to hide our heads under the tablecloth. My tendency to snicker when served with breadsticks, which I acquired during my other restaurant visit with the two drug salesmen who were discussing how to "enlarge your proboscis naturally" with diagrams they drew on napkins, had progressed to any "stick" shaped food. But back to the lesson.
We were sitting in a local restaurant, right next to a table where four Canadian women were just being seated as we ordered. Daughter was trying to decide whether she wanted an iced tea or a raspberry iced tea, which seemed to be on par with China deciding whether or not to devalue its currency, only a little more complicated. I was trying to find something that didn't have a nickname like "Bunyan-sized" or "Belly-buster." Our neighbors to the North (do they still call Canadians that in social studies? do they even HAVE social studies anymore?) were discussing the relative merits of drinks before dinner or drinks with dinner or, maybe even, drinks with dessert, one of them said boldly. There was much snickering and trips down memory lane to other occasions when "Barb had that coconut drink and we didn't know it was triple strength and the waiter was so nice about his mustache getting singed and his zipper getting stuck halfway with his shirt in it."
Finally, they all agreed that they'd just start with a couple of shots before dinner, go with beer with their meals and maybe have a little sweet wine with dessert. I should have left at that point, but Daughter had finally decided she'd just have water and I had found a menu item in the "good for you" category, which meant that it had fewer than 600 calories. Actually, it said, "less than 600 calories" but I automatically translate "less" into "fewer" thanks to my 4th grade English teacher, who drummed the whole "fewer if you can count it" and "less if you can weigh it" mantra into my head. It’s now stuck there and won't get out unlike other more useful mantras like "don't put the kettle on and go outside just for a minute" or "check your bank statement before you write that check". But I digress.
Daughter and I were having our usual restaurant conversation which consists mostly of her saying how hungry she is and me saying why don't you eat a roll. Then she says that she'd be too full to eat her food if she ate a roll, which is when the ladies next to us all let out a great bray of laughter that made us look over at them. They were all very red in the face, so I figured the shots had done their work. Barb, who seemed to be the most highly charged of this group of live wires, said, "But how do you BOTH use it? Don't you kind of have to hook up to it?"
I was starting to have a suspicion that they weren't talking about installing software and the next round of conversation proved it when they went into very graphic detail about what we'll euphemistically call a very advanced marital aid with, er, how shall I put this? Well, let's just say that if it was a video game, and there probably will be one of these out at some point if there isn't already, it would be a two-player game with dual controllers.
By this time, Daughter and I were both very red in the face and hardly knew where to look. Every time I looked over at her, she burst into wild laughter and the same thing happened to me when she looked at me. Now, we're not prudes, either one of us. But she IS 13 and says "eeeuuww" whenever things get too racy in movies or on TV or at the mall. She doesn't like "people who are falling out of their clothes" or "people mauling each other in public" either. And, I guess we could add "people talking about sex toys in restaurants" to that list, at least for her. Me, I was getting an education. I'm 59, but my motto is that you’re never too old to learn. I'm an auto-didact, which has nothing to do with anything kinky, by the way. Well, unless you're learning something kinky. Oh, just look it up.
We got our food and started to eat, although we were thinking maybe that was a risky thing to do given the choking issue when you're laughing like two hyenas. The ladies, who all looked like either school teachers or librarians or maybe school librarians, got their food and one of them, probably Barb, but I didn't quite catch which one it was, motioned to her plate of spaghetti and they were all off into gales of laughter again. I was hoping Daughter wouldn't look over at the arrangement of meatballs and a sausage, but she did and then we were off again. I was starting to feel like an 8th grader, back when anything to do with sex or bodily functions was hilarious because it was so scary and unlikely sounding and forbidden. Then I realized that - if anything like this had happened to my mother and me when I was 13 - she probably would have gone over and whacked Barb with her purse, given her a Bible tract and then come back and whacked me upside the head for listening.
Lucky for my daughter, I'm not that kind of mom. I did kind of try to distract her when the conversation next door got even more X-rated as the drinks kicked in. By the time they got to dessert and the wine that went with it, even the waiter was blushing and she had tattoos, a green Mohawk and a shirt that would have made a nice belt if there had been a little more of it. Daughter was jotting down terms to look up when she got home ... Oh no wait; that was me!
We decided to forego dessert and left just as Barb was getting up to show the folks at the next table "the flamenco dance I did in Barcelona last winter when I fell on top of that drummer and just about busted his c******... “I won't tell you what Daughter and I thought Barb said, but I will say that the term for a small drum used in flamenco music is spelled "cajon" in case you're wondering, and Barb pronounced it plurally, so I guess she broke, at least, two of them. The poor man. I wonder if it ended his musical career. It's hard to make beautiful music with busted cajones, I would imagine.
Anyway, believe me; I've only touched the surface of the conversation we overheard here. There was much more about how to get pregnant, how not to get pregnant, how to seduce husbands away from their Blackberries at 3 a.m. (yeah, there's an app for that and Barb has it) and how to avoid sleeping on, um, damp sheets and how they get damp. (Pouring a glass of water over an unresponsive mate will do it every time. Ask Barb.) Daughter and I are considering giving up restaurants for a while, or maybe just picking up takeout for our once-a-week treats. Which reminds me of something Barb said about her sex life, but I promised I won't digress anymore and I won't.