All In the Family
Now I know how my old friend Bobby Kennedy, Jr. feels when everybody in his family isn’t talking to him anymore. Like me, Bobby is one of eleven kids. Well, last week’s Keep Your Dukes Up about swearing really Iit the house on fire. O’Boy. I always have Ferguson in our office proof the emails before posting. Ya know, for typos and grammatical errors. I was Mickey the Dunce in English class and I’m not much better now. Anyway, sometimes Ferguson slips one of his own lines or jokes in there without my noticing.
Turns out Ferguson went rogue last week. Instead of saying my mother sometimes swore to relieve stress, he upped the ante and said the old lady swore like an ironworker. Holy Christ. All hell broke loose. My brothers and sisters saw it and it was like I was bitten to death by ducks.
It was even worse than when I wrote the obit for my sister Wesa, who passed away in ‘16. She ran a copy shop in the Village Commons that we named Motormouth's, because Weezy could talk and talk. Her son Lenny and my son Joe helped her run the store, along with an ex-convict named Bobby Clements. In the obit, I credited Joe, Lenny, and Bobby with “tanking the business.” My sisters couldn’t believe that made it into the obit. I got in the same kind of trouble for my dad’s obit—and for his eulogy I delivered. After that address, I was told I’d never be allowed to do either ever again. So it goes.
You know how Pete Hamill wrote that great book A Drinking Life? I’m working on my book now and I’m calling it A Life Of Starting Trouble.
Keep your dukes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2JnDKvuNzw
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