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THIS is a picture, one of maybe 50 or so, that I have on my fridge. It's me, about 20 years ago, making a goofy pose for a picture as I'm making absurdly silly, boy-like faces at my eminently teasable sister.
Think about that...
I was teasing my sister -- one of three I have, all of them younger than me to go with two brothers -- as she slept on a hot afternoon at a cottage on Wallace Lake in the wilds of eastern Manitoba in the beautiful Canadian Shield.
And I was getting huge laughs out of it. And I have been doing it for three generations of women in my life.
My sister (who would many years later struggle with breast cancer and survive the removal of both her breasts, and become a huge inspiration for me) promptly woke up and just about kicked me in the gonads. Mission accomplished, gonads still intact.
And now fast-forward to yesterday, and I was teasing my daughter by taking pictures of her in her pyjamas, a big zit on her cheek, hair all tussled, looking not like she'd want to look for a picture, hiding her face behind a cushion.
The pictures themselves? Lost, unfortunately, somewhere between a digital camera I still don't know how to properly use and a fancy-schmancy computer I still don't know how to properly operate.
Suffice to say, said daughter was protesting as dad took the unwanted pix as he was laughing, and she was crying and cursing and laughing all at the same time...
So the moral of today's moribund missive is that women are many things to men, the most basic of them, of course, being that they are indispensable and our reason for being and everything, basically, that we live for.
But an inescapable, unavoidable, thoroughly enjoyable and necessary element of that male/female reality is that they are teasable, and we males wouldn't be doing our duty -- or making their lives worth living -- without teasing them beyond all reason.
All of the most precious women in my life -- my mom, who we incessantly teased about her manner of even saying hello on the phone; my grandmother, a French-Canadian under-five-footer who I'd pinch on her large bum and turn around in her swivel chair (you HASS-HOLE!).
My three sisters, who still treasure my teasing and give it back to me in spades and much more; all the women I've been with romantically, in one way or another that only enriched our relationships; and now my daughter.
They all have had to endure my silly, roll-your-eyes, moronic, kid-like humor that's modelled after, let's see, Agent 86 on Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, Ace Ventura, Mr. Bean, Austin Powers...you get it.
And they love it, or at least I hope so. And if I didn't have the freedom to do it and to have women who love me accept the corny stuff and laugh at it, and let themselves be the targets of it, life just wouldn't be so much fun.
