“What’s this button do?”<\/p>\n
I looked at the shifter my son was pointing at. We were in our minivan, getting ready to go shopping. “It lets me shift into drive,” I said, demonstrating. “It prevents the shifter from getting bumped accidentally.”<\/p>\n
“Oh,” he said. “That explains it!”<\/p>\n
“Explains what?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Never mind,” he said. “I just tried to\u00a0shift it once, and it didn’t move. I didn’t know why.”<\/p>\n
“You tried to shift the minivan into drive?”<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t this car!” he said quickly. “It was our old\u00a0minivan. Before we got this one.”<\/p>\n
I looked at\u00a0him without saying anything.<\/p>\n
“No, no, no!” he said. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”<\/p>\n
I continued watching him.<\/p>\n
“Okay,” he said, gesturing with his hands. “It was\u00a0with Mom. She had just gotten out of the car. . .” His voice trailed off.<\/p>\n
“Are you done getting yourself in trouble?” I asked.<\/p>\n
He nodded. “This is why I hate small talk.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve never been that good at small talk either, but this… this was an epic fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-GW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}