The kids we were going on the diving trip with were between 14 and
sixteen and in the full flower of their adolescent awkwardness. It is
that strange time in a boy's life where he has all of the desire and
chemical imperative to reproduce and none of the subtlety generally
required to trick girls into mistaking lust for love. There were a
pair of boys who talked solely in innuendo and in phases like that
gem recently coined by Mike Myers as Wayne in Wayne's World -
“. . .that's what she said”. That joke probably has never been
funny and is on par with finding instances of dirty words in
innocuous statements in their appeal almost exclusively to adolescent
boys and men who never moved passed that point. They were the two
funniest guys that they had ever met and thought everyone shared that
opinion, I certainly did not and I am confident I was not alone in
that opinion. While we were camping over the night before we were
going to board the dive boat my friend Cole, my brother and I were
heading over to the showers and commissary when we passed those two
goofs in a state of agitated glee boarding on school-girlish
giddiness. They stopped us with a couple of “dudes, dudes, come
heres” and we did, just to see what had these youngsters all a
twitter. They brought it in close for a little conspiratorial
revelation and when they thought we were close enough for a secret
excitedly told us that they had just seen a woman’s boob, and tit.
They actually divided it up like that – specifically, 'boob' for
the breast and 'tit' for the nipple. They filled us in on the back
story by telling us that they were over at the culinary water spigot
when a woman bent over to pick up a bucket, and there it was right
there for them to see, the mythical breast and nipple, twice over.
When we heard what the news was we were a little less than impressed
with the level of excitement a little non-sexual breast sighting had
generated in these lightweights but the pay off was just around the
corner. The boys looked up and told us that a passing woman in a
floral muumuu was the 'chick' whose bosoms they had spied. This
matronly and basically shapeless and sexless woman would have even
been too old to be in the running for 'chick' when Nixon was
president. She possessed those pendulous and basketball-esque breasts
that woman of a certain age are burdened with at an age when they no
longer add to the figure but still cause back pain. We nearly
simultaneously expressed our disbelief that this grandma was the
'chick' who they had gotten all riled up about, “Her?”
“Yeah, dudes, boob and tit.”
We laughed and I laid some wisdom on these young and earnest seekers
of incidental nudity, “Guys, a breast is not a breast is not a
breast.” I explained that when you accidentally saw a grandmother's
exposed bust the more appropriate response would be uncomfortable
silence or even minor disgust not triumphant braggadocio. They were
wounded and defensive saying that they had at least seen a boob and
tit which is more than we had. True enough, and they could keep their
undisputed victory in sneaking a peak at an upholstered mound of
geriatric breast. . .and tit.
