Bite Me
A story about the power of words
I was reminiscing about when my daughter was a teenager so many years ago. Like all teenagers, she went through numerous phases. It is all part of their exploration of life. They will obsess over something for a month or two then it is forgotten for something new and different. This goes for fashion or hair style or music or even vocabulary.
My daughter went through one particularly obnoxious phase once when she was constantly saying, “Oh, bite me.” I am not sure if she picked that up from Bart Simpson or from her friends at school but that seemed to be her pat response to just about everything. She must have said it a few hundred times a day and this phase of hers seemed to last forever. I let it be because I knew it would pass, but she was holding onto it for a very long time.
Then one hot summer day I drove my daughter out to the baseball fields by the river. She had just joined a softball team and wanted to practice her hitting so I spent an hour pitching to her so she could practice batting. Afterwards we were walking back to the car and she was scratching herself like crazy. Being close to the river, the ball fields were swarming with mosquitoes.
“I must have a hundred mosquito bites,” she yelled as she threw her gear into the back seat of the car. Looking at me she asked, “Don’t you have a…
