The Texas Rangers

The other day I was at work and this guy that I work with (who wears way too short of shorts and knows (and talks) way too much about Indian folklore, and boy scouts, and the "old ways", etc...) brought his 6 year old kid in to the shop. This is not unusual as the mom usually comes at the same time and they do a hand off.

Well, this day there was a big accident and the mom was stuck in traffic so I had the privilege of spending almost an hour with the little tike (tyke, tyche, teyeche, tiche?). I guess maybe I should start with some background. Every time I have seen the kid he has been carrying a rifle. Now, it does have an orange cap on the end and a yarn strap to sling it over his shoulder (I assume for those long marches between battles) so it is fairly obvious that it is not a real rifle, but it is a rifle none the less.

After working with this kid's dad for a couple of minutes, it was obvious that the apple didn't fall far from the tree. Why do I say that? Mainly because anytime there are no customers he takes his file and continues work on the bow (as in bow and arrow) he is whittling out of a tree he "felled" himself and then allowed to cure for a year prior to beginning the carving process.

So I am somehow left alone with the kid for like 30 minutes while his dad skins a deer or something out back. Anyway I'm doing the obligatory kid small talk, "how old are you...what's your favorite color...does your rifle shoot in the rain?" when it hits me. I know this kid from somewhere. I can't figure it out, but the more he talks the more I am convinced I have met this kid before. I kept trying to figure out how I would know a little pale faced, red-headed, kid with a heavy country accent. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. TEXAS RANGER!! This kid is an identical twin to the kid off Talladega nights.

So as soon as I realized who I was dealing with I knew my next task was to get him to say some of the lines. All I wanted was to hear one, "Your house smells like cat urine" or maybe a, "One of you terds is about to get smacked in the mouth if you don't keep it down!" But how could I teach a 6 year old to say, "Chip, I'm gonna scissor kick you in the back of the head!" It just didn't seem right. Partly because I could hear his dad finishing up the authentic tee pee he was building in the back room, but mostly because I was afraid Chris Hansen would come out of behind the sleeping bags and say that they were doing a Dateline special on predators who tried to make young children say things like, "Chip, I'm gonna come at you like a spider monkey!"

I am not one to back away from a challenge, but I don't think that teaching this kid new vocab words would be the best way to bond with my new coworker. Not to mention I'm pretty sure he could make short work of me and make sure no one found my body. So, after all that I never did get him to say anything but, "I love knives" and that was just because he was trying to convince me to open the knife case and let him play with one.

But there is still time and I won't be happy until there is a little redheaded country 6 year-old with, "Let's burn the joint down" in his vocabulary.