The Unleavened Truth by Darryl A. Forman

Author:Darryl A. Forman [Forman, Darryl A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611870251
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

What’s in a Name

One afternoon, my two-and-a-half-year-old GAP-ad-adorable nephew pointed to his toddler-sized crotch and announced, “I have a big penis.” Everything being relative, especially when it’s your sister’s kid, I couldn’t tell him otherwise. Actually, I was less interested in the comparison than I was surprised by his use of the word penis. This was a word not said in nice homes in the suburbs of Boston, where I grew up in the fifties, a time so long ago that there wasn’t even one GAP store. What a penis was called in my home was “mackie,” though to this day no one knows how it got that name.

I do know how I learned that mackie was not to be found in Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body or any other medical tome. It happened when I was in fourth grade and we were reading a story about a woman, a teacher, no less, named Miss. Mackie. I was in the blue group, which everyone knew was code for the better readers, and Mrs. Welch asked some of us to read parts of the story aloud. One night, I was reading ahead, just in case Mrs. Welch called on me to read. And there she was—Miss Mackie, and she was teaching a fourth-grade class. I thought I’d read it wrong, so I read it again, but I was in the blue group—I knew exactly how it read. Even alone, I blushed, but only for a moment, because that’s how much time elapsed before abject terror struck. OH MY GOD—WHAT IF MRS. WELCH CALLS ON ME TO READ THAT PART OF THE STORY?

I remember that my mouth got dry and my stomach started to hurt. My fears were so engulfing that I never once thought about how my fellow blue classmates would feel about saying “the word” out loud. Had I been able to broach such a sensitive subject with my eight-and-a-half-year-old classmates, I would have learned that my fears were unwarranted. But I could no sooner say what I thought was the word penis to my classmates as I could pee standing up. Empathy, schlempathy, I started praying.

I made deals with God that had me doing anything from feeding starving little ethnic children to becoming a nun…and I’m Jewish. I promised promises upon promises to my family that had me not only washing every single dirty dish every night for the next 20 years, I also threw in that I’d try to be nicer and not as sarcastic…and I’m Jewish. I was ready to give up teasing my brother and looking through my sister’s purse—anything, just so that I wouldn’t have to say the equivalent of Miss Penis in front of my classmates and teacher.

I could have skipped the terror by feigning an illness, but the auditions for the class play were scheduled for the same day, and Mrs. Welch was also the drama teacher. The play was Hansel & Gretel (although there was an uproar among many parents who

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