Brian-Brian
by Eric Miller
Jim Jensen
watched his 14 year old daughter play in a round-robin
drill at the tennis club. It was very obvious
that her hormones zoned in on one very specific
guy across the net from her. Each time they were
paired, the level of her game rose to near
professional levels. The hormonal levels of her
male opponent responded to the challenge by
opening his eyes wide with wonder and dropping
his jaw to the floor with lustful infatuation.
Storm clouds passed through Jim’s mind, and
on the way home he asked Hilary about "Jaw
Dropper."
“Who?,”
she asked, in the most blasé manner she
could muster.
"You know,
the heavy hitter drooling out of both sides of
his mouth who kept stepping on his tongue."
"Sorry,
Dad, I’m drawing a blank."
“Picture
'Mouth Drooler', aka 'Tongue Stepper',
although you may only remember him as the lech at
whom you hit your professional level forehand
right between his eyes."
“Oh yeah,
what about him?”
“What’s
his name?”
"Brrriiiaaannn,"
she oozed, squeezing out every grain of sugar
from its oh so sweet sound.
The storm
clouds that had passed through her father’s
mind did a u-turn, returned, and thickened.
And so began
Hilary’s seven and a half year romance, a
nail biting match of double faults, foot faults,
and missed line calls, during which Jim and his
wife Mary held their breath, while hanging
precariously from a precipice. Wanting to tear
out their hair, they couldn't because their
fingernails were preoccupied with holding onto
the cliff's edge; however, their hair had a mind
of its own, and needing no help from anyone or
anything else, it whitened nicely in a very short
period of time.
Although it
was a close line call, Hilary and Brrriiiaaannn
finally acknowledged that tennis and
hormones were really all that they had in common,
and they went their separate ways. Ironically
though, Hilary ended up marrying a guy whose name
was also Brrriiiaaannn.
To keep the
Brrriiiaaannns straight, Jim renamed them Brian
One and Brian Two, but instead of calling his son-in-law
Brian Two, he called him Brian-Brian.
"You need
to stop calling Brian, Brian-Brian. I want you to
just call him Brian," Hilary implored.
"But that's
Brian One's name, isn't it?," her Dad
questioned.
"You can
call Brian One, Brian-Brian, if it makes you
happy, but I want you to stop calling Brian Two,
Brian-Brian. Just call him Brian, okay."
"How can
I do that? Your husband appeared on the scene
after Brian One, so that makes him Brian Two, or
Brian-Brian, right?"
"Look at
it this way, Dad. You never see Brian One, and
you most likely never will. You see Brian Two
constantly. He's the number one Brian in my life.
Brian One came in second, for which you should be
very happy. So just rename Brian One as
Brian-Brian, and just rename Brian Two as Brian.
“Point,
game, set, match, Ms. Jensen,” her father
announced. “Give my regards to Bri,” he
added.
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