Not a Cute-Kid Story
By JEFF JOHNSON

Recently my wife and I were out for dinner with our son, Fritz, who is 2, and the 10-year-old upstairs-neighbor girl we were baby-sitting. Except for Fritz, we spent the meal quizzing one another.

"You've interviewed Hilary Duff?" the little neighbor girl asked me between bites of a chicken skewer.
"Yep," I replied, grabbing a skewer for myself.
"Whoa!" Her eyes bulged.
"You're like 38 times smarter than her though," I quickly pointed out. "Trust me."
"Really?"
"Yes."

I said this not to disparage Duff, but (a) because it was true and (b) because as a new parent, I take proper measures to double-reinforce confidence in any child I encounter. Even if I only pass them on the street. This often makes running the simplest of errands a daylong affair, and it is why I generally avoid Park Slope.

Then the little upstairs-neighbor girl looked down at Fritz and asked us, "What do you think he'll be when he grows up?"

Before we could answer, Fritz looked up at the girl and shouted, "Poop." (He's potty training at the moment, though he is mainly in a phase when he's only announcing it.) And of course, the little upstairs-neighbor girl laughed, and so did we. Cute story, right? The end, right?

You're damn right it is.

This is the kind of sickeningly sweet, seemingly innocuous family story that can attach itself to a child via parental retelling and chortling for the rest of his life. Tell a kid enough times that he once told the little upstairs-neighbor girl that he thought he was gonna be poop, and the kid starts thinking he is poop. And "Poop" turns out to be the guy in the frat house who tries to snort jambalaya in order to make his frat brothers (who hate him) laugh, and the only person who truly gets a chuckle out of this is the emergency-room doctor's 12-year-old son the following morning while riding to private school in his mother's Audi. So when my kid is 13, on the verge of either joining the tennis team or the smoke-marijuana-in-the-woods team, I'm not gonna trot out the "Hey buddy, you said you were gonna be poop" story.

Here's another cute-kid story, a sort of Siamese twin to the above story, which sounds nice enough until you realize that Siamese twins sometimes share a lung, and they wear tight and poorly assembled tuxedo jackets and dockworkers pay a nickel to throw peanut shells at them.

I had a hydrocele when I was young. This meant that my scrotum briefly filled with fluid and swelled up. My parents got mileage out of this story for upward of 20 years. My mother took to referring to it as my "problem," and any time any child around me had so much as a hangnail, she'd bring it up.

Neighbor lady: Jerry chipped a tooth.
My mom: That's nothing. Jeffrey, tell Mrs. Toothchippema about your problem.
Me: That was seven years ago!
Mom: Jeffrey, why don't you tell her?
Me: I had a problem.
Neighbor lady: We know that, dear. What was it?
Me: My scrotum filled up with water, apparently.

As I remember it, every time I got to the word "apparently," a giant quittin'-time whistle would materialize, then sound, and every person who lived in my city would come outside and laugh until no noise was coming out of their mouths. Things went downhill from there. It has obviously played a role in my "earning potential" and is the reason I still cannot get a decent night's sleep until I have wept for 75-odd minutes.

So now that I'm a dad, here's my plan:

Fritz, age 11: What was I like as a little kid?
Me: Well, none of us are geniuses, but you were pretty sweet.
Fritz, age 19: Did I ever do funny stuff as a kid?
Me: Nothing special comes to mind, but we loved you.
Fritz, age 37: What was I like as a kid?
Me: You were a good kid. You liked saltines.

And finally, when my kid is a very reasonable 55-year-old who drives whatever the future equivalent of a Buick Century is, and he has changed 18,000 diapers, and his own son is a successful astronaut/cat burglar, and I'm on my deathbed and we are both very weary of everything we've spent years concealing from each other, and he asks, "Did I ever do anything funny as a kid?" I'll say, "You claimed you would grow up to be poop."

And he will not blush. His wife will be too grossed out by my condition to even be in the room with us. In fact, no one in the room will be someone he'd ever conceive of being romantically involved with. The nurses will be stocky Latvians with hair-sprouting warts. So there will be no embarrassment possible. And he won't even pause. He'll just say, "Eh, it figures." Then he will wink at me, and I will die, and he will inherit my vast empire. None of which I have now, but I've got about 53 years to rake it in, once I shake off the wounds inflicted by my parents and stop explaining to my aunts what my "problem" was.