Dear...were you menstruating?

 Dear...were you menstruating?

     Strange how mentioning things that were unheard of back when they happened are now commonplace. Even in the let the freak fly 1960's it would be quite rare to speak about women's private parts or men's "business" as my Mom called the package. The P-word was quite jarring outside of boys who were not near females and being boys. In my senior year of High School, the chapter on Human Reproduction was removed from the Physiology book and left at school. You would not want the boy pervs masturbating while looking at those diagrams of fallopian tubes! What was even more rare was our parents talking openly about sex and their attitudes about forbidden topics were downright prudish. If you put five boys in a car on the way somewhere the conversation was all about sex in the vernacular but at home the mere mention of a penis would cause terrible embarassment. Even when one of the dogs let his "flashlight battery" stick out it was just chuckled at and not pointd out for fear of offending. As a matter of fact IF an adult used  that kind of locker room talk around teenagers they would be considered gross or uncouth. Behind the scenes it was non-stop curiousity twisted by kid tales that were far off the mark. I was given a chore of collecting the waste baskets around the house and throwing the contents in the barrell outside. So when I saw mysterious toilet paper wrapped bundles with blood-stains on the end I made the assumption that these items were connected to sex and it hurt the women since they were bleeding at the end of the procedure. As Greg would tell you his Mom and Dad were very puritanical about sex and certainly would never talk about the subject at the dinner table when John had his cup of tea. So zoom forward into the late 1980's after brother Stephen had married MaryAnn and took up a more respectable home in Silverado just above the creek on a small hillside.It worked to satisfy his need for the nature of the canyon but it was new and neat enough for the more particular MaryAnn. On weekends they would take hikes up and down the canyon trails, only taking care to stay clear of rattlesnakes and black widows. Yet, in an extremely rare circumstance an untethered dog approached them barking and they were just trying to keep moving until it lurched forward and bit MaryAnn on the thigh creating a good-sized wound. It was an injury on two levels as the bite had to be treated at an emergency room and the psychic wound made the normally animal-loving woman afraid of large dogs. This was a bit of a problem at the family headquarters on Terraine in Long Beach where my parents lived with a group of dogs always causing a ruckus. So,in the following weeks everyone was back home to visit and have dinner as MaryAnn began to tell her harrowing tale of dog-attack with the entire family rivetted. Out of nowhere BC in his unique breathless rasp boomed across the room "Dear...were you menstruating?" His question stopped the entire tribe dead still and we looked at eachother afraid to laugh or gasp. MaryAnn who was on the down side of menopause was able to assure him she was not but the sentence lingered on in lore to this day. He did complete his thought by saying dogs sometimes were attracted to mentrual blood and would become aggressive, While this is possible in certain dogs it might have been  best to express that thought first before the blunt question.