Last night at dinner, the Wife ordered clam cakes.
“Are their clams in clam cakes?” the boy asked. He and the lass, both, seem incapable of accepting as fact some minimal level of truth-in-advertising. Or naming.
But his question provided me with an opening for mischief, and I took it.
“Of course it’s got clams in it. Shells and all.”
He was initially skeptical “No it doesn’t,” he retorted.
“Sure it does. You know what clams are right?” He nods. “Well, have you ever seen a clam without a shell? Of course not. They cover the whole thing with dough and fry it up. You just have to be careful to chew it in the back of the mouth so you don’t break any of your teeth.” I said all this matter-of-factly, like it was common knowledge. The Wife was sitting next to him rolling her eyes.
If he’d been thinking, he’d have picked up on my half-truths. But clearly he wasn’t, as he sat back and considered what I said.
Though to his credit, he still wasn’t completely buying it. When the clam cakes finally arrived, he asked his Mother if there really were clam shells in it. She answered “No.” But I stepped in quickly:
“Of course their are. Look, I’ll prove it- listen…” I said. I picked up a clam cake and took a bite from a crustier area and asked “There, did you hear the crunching of the shell?” He nodded. The Wife was staring at me with an incredulous look, but she said nothing. I think she was shocked at his gullibility.
I’ll also note, she didn’t step into to call me on my bluff. That’s called “complicity.”
The boy decided to try a clam cake. Just before he bit into it, I told him to be careful where he bit to make sure he wasn’t trying to bite through a shell. He took it from his mouth and looked around the clam cake and chose a different spot to bite in. When I ask if he’d bitten into a shell, he shook his head. I gave him a thumbs-up sign to indicate a good job of choosing where to bite.
As it turned out, he liked the clam cake and finished the whole thing. When he was done, he mentioned to me that he didn’t think his had a clam shell in it because there hadn’t been anything crunchy.
“Well, probably, the cooking process softened up the shell. That happens sometimes when you fry stuff.” That seemed to settle the whole matter. The Wife’s eye were doing somersaults at this point. But she still didn’t step in to set him straight.
The entire time, I kept expecting him to look at me and call me on my bluff, ridiculous as it was. But he never did.
I’ll have to up the ante for the next time.
5 replies on “Gullible”
Is this your attempt at payback for the ‘man in the moon dropping cheese on your dad’ ????
Heh- I still plan on playing that one on them. Perhaps a little later this summer.
🙂 I’ll be looking forward to that blog entry ! !
This reminds me of Calvin’s dad from Calvin & Hobbes. I’ve always wanted to fill that role and can’t wait for my son to grow up enough to start asking questions.
One of my favorites:
Calvin: Dad, will you explain the theory of relativity to me? I don’t understand why time goes slower at great speed.
Dad: It’s because you keep changing time zones. See, if you fly to California, you gain three hours on a five-hour flight, right? So if you go at the speed of light, you gain more time, because it doesn’t take as long to get there. Of course, the theory of relativity only works if you’re going west.
I recall another good one where Calvin asks his father where kids come from. It ends with the Father explaining that Calvin was a “Blue Light Special” at KMart.