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*RHYTHM IS GONNA GET YOU By Jodi Walker
In early elementary school I used to ride a big yellow school bus one town over to the local Catholic School along with 6 of my siblings and 30 or so other kids each day. Unlike today, when God forbid children should walk 2 blocks to catch the bus, those days all the kids in the neighborhood gathered at the Bus Stop, which hustled and bustled with all the natural order of a small Lord of the Flies-style village. We warily watched the plain-clothes public school kids walk past us to their elementary school up the street; at that time, I thought the world was made up of Catholics, Jews and Publics. One fall day when I was in 3rd grade, as the bus turned a particularly sharp corner, we suddenly fishtailed into a car; the loud “thump” was followed by the smaller “thumps” of each kid whacking against the tall green foam seat in front of him. Very softly, but loud enough for just the right ears to hear, the middle-aged bus driver with the tight Mike Brady perm muttered under her breath: “Whoops, I misjudged.” Within 30 seconds, the entire bus was chanting the now fabled “Whoops! I misjudged,” as we flew around the bus like charged particles about to collide, and in my family, that line still evokes peeing in the pants. The line lives on. My two year old daughter and I find at least 3 reasons a day to use it, from spilling the milk to slipping on the stairs. She’ll pull it out with remarkable comic timing; I’ll be in the kitchen spattering spaghetti sauce on the stove while she’s playing in the living room, and her “I misjudged” will answer my “whoops” like saliva dripping from the mouth of Pavlov’s bell-stimulated dog. Throw her little 2 year old pronunciation into the mix and it’s high comedy, I assure you. And now, I have the ultimate scenario befitting such a versatile and self-effacing phrase. Dave Walker and I, using a combination of loose monitoring of my cycle and the age old “pull and pray” method of birth control, (which, by the way, served us quite well for 10 years) have inadvertently conceived a child. Whoops, I misjudged. (See how perfectly it fits?) One evening, late January, as I lay on the couch feeling unexplainably exhausted and ruminating with Dave about my nausea as of late, I joked that it had been a while since my last period. Dave’s clever retort was that it took sex to get pregnant, so unless I had been divinely intervened, we were probably OK. I won’t lie; we were going through a bit of a dry spell, so we didn’t think twice about it. The next day, I took the time to go ahead and think four or five times, and then I remembered New Years Eve. Dave and I had tickets two nights in a row to see Sound Tribe Sector Nine, and on the second night, his folks had Janie for the overnight. As my friend Mary Kate put it when I called her gasping for air, it was like prom night at the Walker’s. So that night, the last evening of January, nearly 5 weeks after the Prom, we had a gig in the city. I grabbed a pregnancy test at Duane Reed and headed down to the filthy bathroom. Two sticks later, I had “stop peeing all over the stick, stupid” results, so I went upstairs and had a beer. The next morning, as Jane sat in her highchair eating Cheerios we tried again. I was absolutely certain that “Not Pregnant” would pop up, about as certain as I was of my tried and true method of suppression. Whoops, I misjudged. |
