A few months back, I suggested the book\u00a0Shane to my youngest son. It’s one of my all-time favorites.\u00a0If you haven’t read it,\u00a0call in sick, buy it online, and spend the day reading it. It’s a\u00a0story of\u00a0the old west,\u00a0about\u00a0a\u00a0gunfighter named Shane and a\u00a0family that he spends some time with. It’s really about a whole lot more than that, but I’ll let you read it for yourself.<\/p>\n
Anyway, my son loved the book. It’s been coming up regularly in conversations.<\/p>\n
Yesterday,\u00a0he and I were having a slam contest at the ping-pong table when it came up\u00a0again. During a slam contest, one person gently serves the ball to the other player, who tries to slam it back. Each player gets five tries, and whoever has the most slams wins.<\/p>\n
“Wow,” he said to me after I missed yet another slam attempt. “You’re really fast. The ball comes up and you’re like wham!”<\/p>\n
“Thanks,” I said.<\/p>\n
“It’s too bad you miss so much.”<\/p>\n
“Just serve the ball,” I said.<\/p>\n
“You’re like Shane,” he continued, giggling,\u00a0“but without the aim.”<\/p>\n
Yeah. You know a book is a success when it works its way into your son’s smack talk.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the record, I did not throw my ping pong paddle at him. I wanted to, but I did not. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[123,122,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8Fd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33307","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=33307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}