Piddle

For many years I thought that piddle was a word made up by my immediate family. Maybe I thought that was because the only place I ever heard it was within our four walls. Webster's Dictionary defines piddle as follows: "to spend time in a wasteful or trifling way." I always thought trifle was an English sponge cake desert, oh well. The reason we often used cleaned up versions of slightly dirtier words may be because we were Southern Baptists and mom was convinced that the powers that be had our home bugged like it was the Watergate Hotel. There was no swearing allowed in our home, we were allowed to think it, we just couldn't say it. We wouldn't want the Baptists to give us what we secretly referred to as "THE LEFT FOOT OF FELLOWSHIP" just becuase the chicken fried steak was tough, or the gravy turned out runny. When we flipped words in our home, I often referred to it as "The Western Okie Translation Pact" or, as I called it the WOPT. Dad and I were always privy to rated R words as we were both exposed to the oilfield at a young age to our fortune or our mom's dismay, depending on your own point of view.

I am a world class piddler and I say that with some pride as I learned from the best, my dad was the undisputed champion. Grandma and grandpa never had time to lag, there was too much to be done it seemed. Grandpa hurried and scurried everywhere he went like a chicken with his tail feathers on fire, but it never once improved his quality of life. My father in his lifetime turned wasting time into an art form possibly in spite of grandpa. It was nothing for dad to go MIA for two hours, only to find he had been in the bathroom trimming his beard. I have seen him disappear for half a day only to find out he had been in the woods communing with nature. I actually have a pictute of him with his arms around a black jack oak tree with the cation below it that reads, the original tree gugger. Some folks think trifling through life is wasteful, but if you enjoy wasting time, is that time actually wasted? Think about it, the answer you come up with could be part of your legacy. I find that I do my best meditating in the kitchen or the back yard. But you won't find me on a yoga mat, likely you will find me with a cup of coffee in hand listening to the songbirds instead. Dad's form of mediation was sighting in a 22 with a Newport pinched between his lips. He claimed that he switched over to smoking menthol cigarettes when he started working in the oil patch so people would (in his Okie dialect) "stop bumming them."

Believe it or not there are rules when it comes to a quality piddle time and I will be glad to lay them out for you. A good piddle only includes time that you CHOOSE to waste. I can sense that you are confounded (confounded is another WOPT word) so I will try to simplify it for you. If a man goes to the restroom with a paper under one arm that is time wasted with quality. If you find yourself in line at the grocery store behind a little old lady with a stack of coupons thick enough to choke a rented mule that is NOT time well wasted, the difference is the addition of frustration. The purest and most unadulterated form of piddle are the hours in which we are able to impress our loved ones with our time-wasting skills. Have you ever in your life heard of someone teaching a cantankerous old tom cat how to do tricks? Believe me when I say it is possible because I have seen it with my own eyes. By definition, most cats are only interested in humans just long enough to get their food dish filled, after that they simply want you to go away. My dad taught his tom cat to fist pump, shake, and roll over among other tricks. Dad's kinship with critters was always impressive and I always maintained he should have had a guest spot on Wild Kingdom.