Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Be honest. How would you say that word? OK, so it is actually spelled Fukuisaurus but that’s beside the point. It was late. I was tired. I saw it how I saw it. And yes, I read it out loud as I saw it. He wouldn’t have even noticed if she didn’t snicker in the other room.
Fukuisaurus. Pronounced foo-koo-I-sore-us. Honestly, who named this thing? Who would think that f-u-k-u is pronounced foo-koo instead of fuck-you? Certainly not me. Certainly not at 9:30 at night when I’ve been going going going going, all day long. What even is this thing? I lived and breathed everything dinosaur-related growing up. Not kidding. I had bed sheets. I had a triceratops on my lunch box. A T-rex on my thermos. Pajamas covered in dinosaurs. T-shirts upon t-shirts with dinosaur puns printed on them. Today is Roar-some. A sight for saur eyes. Bad to the bone. Have a dino-mite day. Plastic toys. Rubber toys. Plastic and rubber toys. When I got a little too old for dinosaur bedsheets I went to see Jurassic Park roughly thirty times in the movie theater. Not even exaggerating there. Why? Simply put: because dinosaurs are cool. And I’d never even heard a whisper of a dinosaur named fuck-you-a-saurus. I would have remembered that one. That would have been my favorite dinosaur to say out loud.
————- // —————// —————
“Dad! Read me a book!” Henry squeals in that whiney, high-pitched demanding tone.
“Not tonight, Dad’s tired,” I mumble from my prone position on the couch, remote controller in hand. “It’s been a long da—”
I feel a pair of eyes burning into the top of my skull. The laser beams sear my flesh nearing my brain cortex. I turn my head and see her standing there. My wife. Stephanie. The love of my life. Arms crossed. That look on Steph’s face dares me to complete that thought. Once that sentence is finished it takes on a challenge, as if by saying what I am saying I am also saying that her day was less stressful, less long, less filled with the anxious moments and tension. She says nothing as our eyes meet. My eyes want to roll into the back of my head. I peel myself off the cushions that held me so close like an after-dinner hug.
“O… K. OK.,” I exhale as I pry myself into an upright position. I stretch but nothing cracks. Missing the days when this same movement of shoulders and hips produced a series of pops and crunk-crunks that made me feel one million times better instantly, I stand up. But I get no reprieve of the day’s tightness. No pops and crunks of a back settling back into place. Just the same tension held within despite my efforts.
Instantly, he’s upon me. Jumping without the fear of not being caught, because of course Dad’s going to catch him. My three-year-old son hurdles himself onto my knees. I catch Henry before he does serious damage and lift him into the sky above my head. His laughter fills the air as I pretend he’s going to crash through the ceiling and bring him back down into the cradle of my arms.
I look over and see Steph has holstered her laser-beam eyes and is now smiling at the scene unfolding in our living room. The crinkles around the edge of those big blues send me signals that she approves, and I smile back. She mouths a thank you as the boy flies like a rocket ship past her in my arms. He shoots up the stairs bouncing off the walls and railing as his Dad complains about his driving skills.
“I’m not driving! I’m flying!” He corrects me as we make it up the stairs and he lands on his feet. He runs into his room, making rocket ship noises as he goes. I follow in a similar fashion as a bad guy from one of those 80s slasher films. Stomping along behind the main character. No matter how fast you run I will always catch up. “Read this!” The shout bounces off the walls in his room like a red rubber ball even before I enter. I feel like I’m about to get hit in the face by that second demanding bounce — the one that always goes in an unexpected, crazy direction.
Henry is already sitting on his bed with his Bun-Bun in his lap and a book in his tiny little hands. Bun-Bun is his cloth bunny we got him before he was even born. Actually, I believe someone else bought it for Henry before he was even in the world yet, but we must have put it on the baby registry. Those days are a whirlwind blur of shopping with a laser gun that magically added items to some magical digital list in some computer somewhere. Its gray like a bunny, has a bunny head with no mouth, and the rest of the body is a cloth towel. Like a dishrag with a ball on top except smooth and soft. Soothing. His older sister Genevieve has one too, except hers is pink and is named Baby B. Same idea though. Probably the same gift from the same relative.
“Daaaaaaaddd,” Henry lets out a high-pitched whine that enters just underneath my skin and crawls all the way up past my neck. “Staaaahhhppp being slowwwww.”
I know he’s refusing to be tired because all of his words are drawing out longer than they should. And the whine is louder at bedtime than at any other time of the day. That whine is like that feeling you get when you place your tongue on a dryish reed in your saxophone mouthpiece at the beginning of lessons. Just thinking of those days sends shivers all the way down my back. I fall onto his bed, my feet barely able to keep me upright. Like I said, today was a long day and all I want to do is sleep. I probably will fall asleep during whatever show Steph and I decide to watch after bedtime. Days like these the sleeping-during-the-TV-show is inevitable.
“Did you brush your teeth?” I ask and immediately wish I hadn’t. Of course he didn’t brush his teeth, and now I have to help him brush them. Ugh. With Genevieve, it was so easy. I would walk into the bathroom with her, sing a cute little jingle about brushing her teeth that I made up on the spot, and she would brush her teeth. Simple. Actually, the jingle I created was a Weird Al Yankovic-style knock off of “The Beating of a High School Janitor” song from the comedic genius of Adam Sandler’s They’re All Gonna Laugh At You album. Yeah, I know. I know what you’re thinking. It’s not as bad as that sounds.
Brush brush brush
All day long
Brush brush brush
While I sing this song
Gonna brush my teeth
Gonna make them shine
Take off the tartar
With too-hoo-thpaste
With my daughter it was easy. With my son, not so much. Some nights I have to hold his little head in a vice grip and scrub his teeth for him. He is particular in his toothpaste: it has to be clean mint flavor. Anything else is unacceptable. Some nights he’s easy. Some nights he brushes his own teeth. But some nights — most nights — he’s difficult.
We finish the toothbrushing adventure and make our way back into bed. Once again, Bun-Bun sitting next to him and the book on his lap. I pick it up and see that he chose a dinosaur book for tonight’s bedtime reading. Sweet. I love dinosaurs. I pick up the hardcover book. It’s an A-Z dinosaur book. A is for Ankylosaurus. B is for Brachiosaurus. Everything is going just fine until F.
F is when it all goes wrong.
“F is for Fuckuasaurus,” I say out loud to my three-year old child.
Fuck. You. A. Saurus. That is how I pronounced this word: Fukuisaurus. A fukuisaurus is pretty much a vegetable-eating velociraptor. It was about the same height as an average human, stood on two hind legs, and had little arms like a T-rex. It was discovered in a section of Japan named the Fukui Prefecture, which is a small geographic area on the western shores of the island. The entire dinosaur is actually a fabricated reconstruction: everything that scientists know about this creature is based on a skull they found.
I knew nothing of this dinosaur. Never heard of it until this incident.
A snicker from the other room stops me from going to the next page. A brief moment of silence follows, then my eight-year-old says, “What did Dad just say?”
“That’s its name,” I reply across the upstairs hallway to defend myself against the two in the other bedroom. “For real, that’s its name!” I say a little louder this time. And then I erupt into laughter. Belly laughter. My laugh fills Henry’s bedroom, then Henry starts laughing because I’m laughing. Before I started laughing he was waiting for me to move on to the “I” dinosaur. Staring at the page like I didn’t just drop an f-bomb in his lap. And the laughter from Henry’s bedroom travels into the bedroom across the hall and we’re all laughing.
“I don’t think that’s how you pronounce it,” Steph replies through chuckles. Genevieve is giggling. Henry is laughing because we all are laughing.
“It’s fooooo-kooooo-a-saurus, Dad,” my daughter corrects me upon entering the room and looking at the book open in my hand. “Fukuisaurus. See the u’s — Those are ‘youuuuuu’ sounds.” Emphasis on the you.
“Well, smarty pants. That’s how I pronounce it.”
Jason K. Bussman is a writer and educator who focuses on memoir and travel. He teaches college courses on the craft of writing and the creative process. In addition to being a college educator, Jason is also a bartender, former high school teacher, former newspaper copy editor, both former and current homemade pizza maker, and most importantly, he is a husband and father who spends his infrequent spurts of free time writing about his observations and experiences.