Day 5: Your Spotted Dick Is Leaking

This is not what Husband needs to hear at the end of a long day. But I had touched it  — sticky, dark and oozing. 

And you wait your whole life to deliver a line like that one. 

But I have another opportunity to shine. We bought the can of spotted dick at an upscale kitchen shop downtown, for a friend named Richard who first  discovered the pudding in England.

One never outgrows junior-high-boy humor if one is lucky.  All the Dicks I have ever known manfully put up with this nonsense.

Perhaps I should rephrase that.

“There’s a terrible innocence and swaggering bravado in fledgling young men that jaded adults would do well to remember.” How’s that?

Down I trot to the store, spotted dick in careful hand so as to avoid infection. The woman at the counter is about my age and seems approachable. Old broads have seen it all, after all, and if we’re lucky (or perhaps just beaten and resigned) we’ve learned to stop taking ourselves so seriously.

There’s a crowd at the counter. I deliver my one-liner to an appreciative audience and feel very pleased with myself. The clerk sends me back to cruise for more dick.

I run into an acquaintance who works there, a fiercely beautiful and sophisticated German woman. I push my luck and whip out the dick joke one last time.

Note to self: classy European women do not appreciate crass juvenile attempts at humor.

“This friend Richard, he likes the pudding?” she asks, with a slight frown.

So I make it worse. I try to explain. I skulk away like an awkward boy who hasn’t yet grown into his feet. I have new empathy for his plight.

And I’m too embarrassed to collect my dick money.