Wooden Nickels

Posts Tagged ‘wooden nickel’

My Old Man was a king of comedy. We’d play the “See ya later, alligator,” game every time he went to work, and usually at bed time too. The call begged the answer: “In a while, crocodile,” and “See ya soon, Baboon,” and “It’s bye-bye, Butterfly!” Easy material to work with, and the Old Man was a master, topping every comeback. Eventually, we’d run out of rhymes and he’d dig out a pearl. In the vernacular of the day, a “pearl” was an especially tasty tid-bit of comedy timed to the ripest point of perfection, with a perfect deadpan delivery. My Dad had a million of them.

One the original pearls was: “Don’t take no wooden nickels.” Wooden nickels? I had to look that up: what the hell was that? What’s the come back to that? Dad kept me stumped right there for a while actually. Because every time we took the “See ya later” game to the point of “Wooden nickels” it would veritably SLAY me, and I would drop dead laughing. The old man would smirk satisfactorily and make his exit.

The wooden nickels perplexed me. At the time, I thought of literally wooden nickels. “Dad, were there ever really actual wooden nickels?” And my Dad told me a story about how after the Civil War, they ran out of silver for coins in the South and had to resort to using actual wooden nickels, and they had a hell of a time getting the wooden nickels out of circulation. Then he told me how they used a wooden nickel as a credit for skeet ball at Coney Island in New York and Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. I was fascinated. Wooden nickels, eh? Civil War? Skeet ball? For reals? You don’t say…

Over the years, the wooden nickels have taken on greater significance. At first the saying just meant “Don’t accept things at face value, ” or more simply “Don’t let yourself be swindled.” Eventually they came to represent and personify a variety of larger and more deep meanings. At some time they may represent the grapes from “The Fox and the Grapes.” At other times they’ve been known to represent other people’s opinions, and gripes. Many is the late night where the wooden nickels have been representative of someone’s anatomy – someone maybe you ought not to go home with, perhaps? The interpretations go on, the wooden nickels continue to evolve, and when placed well in conversation, they still have the ability to slay an unsuspecting audience. Take ‘em for a spin: you’ll see.

Soon enough in the “See ya later” ritual though, the wooden nickels burned out like a sugary pop single in heavy summertime rotation. I had awful comebacks to it; couldn’t get the hang of the timing. “Don’t wait in line for that dime.” Just lame. I had nothing. The time was ripe for another of Dad’s pearls. One night, at bedtime, I was going off to brush teeth and we started a round of “See ya later,” and when we came around to the “Wooden nickels” bit, the Old Man whips out this one: “Don’t take the dump road.”

Dump road? Don’t take it? Why not? Will bad things happen on that road? Why would I be out on the dump road anyways? Unless of course I was going to the dump. Dump, eh? Could that be a double entendre? What the hell is a double entendre; I’m only six years old. What the eff… the “dump road” put me on the ropes and left me there. It doesn’t even rhyme. I still to this day don’t exactly know what it means. Popular opinion seems to lean towards increasingly obscene potty humor, and I’ll let your imagination take that for what it’s worth. But what my Dad meant by it I may never truly know.

But the “Dump road” sparked a barrage of perfectly ridiculous additions to the “See ya later” game. Pearls like “Don’t pet no burnin’ dogs,” and “Never swing a cat indoors,” have been strung out along my comedic palette ever since, and my love for the non sequitur was begun. The gift for me is that when things become so unfathomable that you simply have to find them humorous, and the fact that they make no sense becomes the part that’s truly funny… that’s the chaos I want to cultivate. My Old Man was a genius at this.

Hopefully I can capture some of these son sequiturs and colloquialisms here in this blog, and you can share yours as well. For now: don’t take no wooden nickels.