Relatively speaking

My family talks funny. My mom and grandparents on her side of the family are all gone now, but I can still hear them using words like privy, lariat, pipsqueak, scuttlebutt and wieners. They said things were okey-dokey and the bee’s knees. My grandfather, a great man who never used the words paradigm, facilitate, sustainability, global warming or Facebook in his life, always referred to the cattle I raised as Aberdeen Angus. When’s the last time you heard them called that, 1954?

I didn’t want to be seen in public with my relatives for fear they’d open their mouths and embarrass me. Take the word “rodeo” for example. I’m proud of the fact that in my hometown there is a large park named after my grandfather with several ballfields and other facilities where the kids of my community can play safely. It’s named after my grandpa because he and some friends had a dream that if they produced annual, big-time, RCA-sanctioned rodeos, they could make enough money to buy the land and build a first-class playground for the kids. They did so in style. Now here’s the embarrassing part: my grandfather always referred to the land where the rodeos were held as the “ro-day-o” grounds.

If you want to lose your cowboy friends in a hurry just say ro-day-o. They’ll think you are from Beverly Hills and do your shopping on Ro-day-o Drive. Golly gee, no one goes to the San Antonio or Denver Ro-day-o and the NFR is not the National Finals Ro-day-o.

I ask you, who else talks this way? No one.

So you can imagine my surprise when I went to the Salinas Rodeo for the first time and old-timers there were referring to it as the Salinas Ro-day-o. I thought I was in some strange time warp where I was back in my childhood. Surely all these people could not be related to me on my mother’s side.

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