My dad was under a lot of stress with having to correct
everyone about everything and them making redo stuff. It is a hard
job to prop up the whole world when the world resists it. He was
working long hours and providing for us and we were just lazing
around, playing and demanding payment every time we turned our hands.
That was his actual phrase 'every time you turn your hands' that
meant made any miniscule effort when translated from the native
Floridian. We would make fun of the phrase by dramatically turning
our hands palm up to palm down when he had turned his back and say
one dollar, two dollars, quietly of course. He would imagine criteria
by which he expected us to live by and then not tell us about it but
be really mad when we had not done the thing that he had only made
up that day in his fevered imaginings as he drove alone in his truck.
Whenever he came home riled up and furious at our lack of effort
towards the projects he imagined that day he would call us Jackasses
and Jennies ( a female donkey), Ape heads, and Sons of Bitches. We
really liked that last one because by inference he was calling our
mother a bitch and we would tell her really loudly that dad was
calling her a bitch. He would then ask us in angered tones, “What
is this? Shit on Jim day?”. I need to make perfectly clear this is
not a story about the one time this happened, it was formulaic and
hardly even varied in phrasing. Like a solemn right that had to
invoke the proper words to activate some arcane power he would ask,
more or less weekly, for years if this day was in fact 'shit on Jim
day'. Of course it was not officially
shit on anyone day but my brother and I would often solemnly confirm
to each other with pursed lips and knowing nods, and out of my dad's
perception that it was, as a matter of fact, shit on Jim day. This
little piece of repetitious theater went on for about four or five
years and then like any long running show, even the classics, it had
run its course and my dad retired the act and the phrase and I have
not been asked what day it was in that specific manner since I was 17
or so.
