I’m just not going to use any more of those cotton-pickin bad words any more!                             By Dave Hamby

              I looked up just in time to see the shovelful of dirt headed straight toward my face.   I didn’t have enough time to duck or close my eyes or do anything like that, but I knew what just hit me.   “Ohhhh!   I’m sorry!” exclaimed my daughter Caitlin.   “I didn’t mean to do that.”   “Yeah,” replied her sister Nanoo, “What she meant to do was put that down your shirt collar.”

              While my friends, Tino and Duane, were nice enough not to laugh out loud, their eyes did crinkle up real hard.   We were all at the park planting trees for Arbor Day.   I had just stepped down into the hole to bust up a big clod when Caitlin whacked me in the face with about four pounds of good old Texas black gumbo dirt.   I’ll admit to experiencing a degree of discomfort and was certainly shocked, but all in all I was pretty pleased with myself because I didn’t let out any profane exclamations.

              You see, I’d been working all week on eliminating any language in my vocabulary that might be offensive to others.   This isn’t as easy as it may sound.   I grew up in a household headed by a professional Army Master Sergeant, my dad.   He was accustomed to ordering folks around and when he did so he would lace his instructions with some very colorful language.   This language crept into every conversation he had.   It took my mom over twenty years to get him to refer to the fertilizer he used in the garden as “manure.”

              Now if this wasn’t enough to mess up my ability to express myself, after I moved out on my ownI began a career in auto-body repair.   Almost thirty years of working in a body shop taught me multi-lingual profanity.   Truth is, I can speak a bit of Spanish but I’m afraid to.  I don’t know if I’m saying, “That’s a very reasonable price,” or “That’s real *%#@&^% cheap!”   Rather than risk it I just say “Sorry, no hable.”

              I’ve been working on cleaning up my act for a number of years.   I can’t ever recall hearing anyone say, “My, will you listen to the obscenities coming out of that person’s mouth?   He must be very wise and clever to be able to cuss that much.”   I even remember Sergeant Dad telling me, “Son, profanity is a means of expression for the ignorant *%@^ #%&*&%.”

              Even though in my mind I’m a much better person than I used to be with respect to the language I use, I apparently have some room for improvement.   God told this to me on Easter Sunday by giving me a sign; or rather, by posting a sign up on the ballpark jumbo-tron.

              Let me explain;

              It was dark Easter morning when we headed out to the minor league baseball stadium for Sunrise Service.   Naturally we were running a little late, we’re always running late. My girls were already through the gate and headed to the car and I was bringing up the rear.   Now we have this Spanish style home and my wife has these big, 35 gallon potted plants on our front porch.   A robin had just built a nest on top of our porch light and whenever we turn on the light it warms up the nest and freaks this little bird out.   Since we want baby Robins as opposed to baked Robin’s eggs, we haven’t been using the porch light.   So here I am, in a hurry, on a dark porch, with no porch light when I find one of my wife’s big planters by barking my shin on it as I’m in a dead run towards the car.   I went staggering out onto our front lawn with my arms pin-wheeling and a string of oaths coming out of my mouth.   Luckily, my girls were getting in the car and they tactfully didn’t hear what I had to say.

              It was about midway through the service when we had this prayer, (with the words all spelled out on the scoreboard,) that went something like; “For though I stumble in the darkness oh Lord, I call out thy name.”   I looked over at my daughters and they were both looking back at me with their hands covering their mouths going, “Tee, hee hee.”   I knew I was busted.

              That’s when I resolved to delete all of the bad language I have in my vocabulary.   It’s not going to be easy.   I’m having a tough time thinking up of a better description for the falderal our government passes out than the droppings of a mature, fertile, male member of the species, mooamus cowamus.   It’s also gonna be hard to think of the average driver as something other than a male, horse-like beast of burden.   If I’m not able to succeed it won’t be for a lack of trying, or lack of divine inspiration for that matter.

(This column was published in the Round Rock Leader and is available for your publication)