Some thoughts on age, and a boyfriend of my daughter who talks too much.

                                                                                 By Dave Hamby

              Isn’t it funny how the older you get, the younger fourteen years of age seems to get. I remember that when I was fourteen I thought I was ready to drive a car, get a job, have a steady girlfriend, and take on the world. These memories are the problem I’m having now that my middle daughter is fourteen.

              My oldest daughter, Lisa, is fourteen years older than my middle daughter, Caitlin, and when she turned fourteen I was too preoccupied with being a Daddy to a brand new baby to realize how perilous that age is. That and the fact that I wasn’t old enough to have the wisdom or the good sense to worry.  Now that baby is fourteen and she has a boyfriend.

              Going back a little I remember Lisa was fifteen when I met her first boyfriend.   His name was Denny and he was a poster child for juvenile delinquents if ever I did see one. When I met him he was wearing a t-shirt that said “I’ve come for your daughter.”   The problem was he didn’t know how to spell “come”.

              We visited a little while Lisa was getting ready and I tried making some small talk.  

               Lisa was a real athlete, she played volleyball, basketball, golf, ran track. In fact today she’s a coach at a high school in Mesquite. Thinking that maybe she met Denny in athletics I asked him,”You play basketball?” “I’m short and I’m white,” he replied. “What do you think?”  

               Lisa was real disappointed that Denny had to go home before they had a chance to go out. All’s well that ends well though. Today Lisa is married to as fine a young man as any father could hope his daughter would marry.

                Now I have to admit that Caitlin’s boy friend is a lot farther up the evolutionary ladder than Denny was.  Still, when I met him he was wearing a t-shirt that said, “Here I am, now what’re your other two wishes.”  When I made small talk he answered with “yes sir,” and “no sir,” and didn’t say “like” and “uhh” too much. He made a good first impression.  

                Because of this good first impression I let him come with Caitlin, grandpa, and myself to the ballpark for an Express game for their first “date.”  

                After the game we dropped him off and Caitlin asked me what I thought of him.   Honestly I thought he talked too much, but if I were to share that I could count on not being able to talk to her for the next couple of weeks.  

                My Mom taught me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then you shouldn’t say anything at all.  Grandpa’s spent the last twenty years trying to teach me not to say anything at all. Still, I wanted to give my little girl some positive affirmation.  

                Now I’ve listened to enough girl chatter to know the most important thing for a young man to be is cute.  I never once heard Caitlin and her buddies talk about how Joey is really strong and Billy is really wise.  They talk about how cute Josh is and how really, really cute Zach is.  

               With this in mind my answer was, “Well, I think he’s really cute”.   

                There’s apparently no bottom to the depths of my stupidity.  Caitlin’s jaw dropped and she got this really strange look. “Dad,” she said with some real concern, “You don’t have any idea how much it bothers me that you think my boyfriend’s cute.”

                 Grandpa was disappointed.  

                Later he shared a little wisdom with me. “You know Dave,” he said, “It’s far better thing for one to remain silent and be thought stupid than it is for one to open one’s mouth and remove any vestige of doubt.”  

               Now he tells me. Still, I know Grandpa gained his wisdom the same way I’m getting mine. Slowly and painfully.

               I wrote this as a regular submission to the Round Rock Leader for my humor column knowing good and well that my kids never, ever, read my stuff.   Well, wouldn’t you know it, Caitlin chose this exact moment to finally get around to reading one of her dad’s columns? It wasn’t enough that she read it, but she had to share it with her boy friend.

            I figured this out on their next date.  When  into my car I asked him, “How are you doing?”

             Instead of getting the lengthy reply I was expecting all I got was a “Fine!”

              I then ventured with something like, “Hey, what to you think of our new pitching roster?”

             No in-depth analysis. Just a “They’re OK.”

             It was then I realized he’d read my column and I had succeeded in hurting his feelings.   He got the last shot in though.   When I was dropping him and Caitlin off at the movies he paused, stuck his head inside the car and asked, “Gee Mr. Hamby, do you really think I’m cute?”

This article was originally published in the Round Rock Leader.