Comic Relief

The other day, having reached a point of no return with something, I blurted out, "Eep". Yes, you read it right the first time. Pronounced just as it is spelled.
Until that moment, I honestly thought nobody ever actually said it. I assumed it was something that had been made up by cartoonists, who had all gone to the same commercial art school. Birds of a feather and all that.
I was alone. Talking to myself. You know how it goes. You're on your fifteenth attempt to accomplish something and it just isn't happening. Steam is building up inside and you just want to let a bit of it vent. So, you let slip the first thing that comes to mind. I could have just as easily said, "crap", or some other mild expletive. I blushed slightly when I realized what I'd said, too. Not because it was "naughty" but because it just seemed so bizarre. It was like someone had taken possession of my mouth for a moment.
Then I chuckled. And I remembered.
You see, my father was a bathroom reader.
I grew up in a tiny little house in steel town, Nova Scotia. This tiny little house, like many of its kind, had only one bathroom, which was also tiny.
 I'll try to give you a picture.
Once, my mother had to make arrangements to have the old, cracked sink replaced and I suggested she might want to consider having a cabinet installed under the new sink. But she told me there just wouldn't be room for it. And I realized she was right. Later, she asked a handyman about installing a fan and he told her to just open the window a crack, because it would not take long for such a small room to air itself out. Problem resolved. There was no room for the usual cleaning supplies or extra rolls of toilet paper, either. She kept them on a shelf over the basement stairs. Forget about a box of Kleenex. She told us to use some of the toilet paper, instead. And there weren't any towels except for the small hand towel to the left of the sink and the fancy pair over which my mother would spread her worn out shower cap, when we took a shower, to prevent them from getting wet. From a sitting position we could reach out and easily touch every wall.
To this cramped environment, at some point, my father introduced his collection of reading material.
My father, like many aging parents - I was born when he was well past forty - had, shall we say, "digestive" issues. Which translated into concerted effort and extended bathroom time for him. Somewhere along the way he discovered, with a fair amount of mental preparation, things went more smoothly; which came in the form of simple reading, involving simple reading material - his comic books. In particular, Archie or Sad Sack comics, with a couple of issues of Beetle Bailey thrown in for good measure. Understand, he bought these comics himself. He never borrowed, begged or stole any of my brother's or mine.
So, despite the lack of space in that bathroom,there were always at least a couple of them on the floor, next to the tub. Once "seated", I could rarely resist reading a few pages. It wasn't like there was much else to do.
Hence, my first exposure to the word, "Eep".
And there were others. Like "gadzooks", "peachy keen", "nifty" and the infamous "egad". All of which I have casually used when the occasion merited it. I justified their use with the fact they were real words.
But I never used "Eep". Mostly, I think, because I was never really convinced it was a real word and I am picky. If it ain't in the dictionary, it ain't comin' out of my mouth.
And there were even longer phrases I remembered. Like "Dilton Doiley's Down the Drain", which was from a story about Archie tutoring Moose in English grammar and the lesson of the day was on alliteration. I can still see Dilton peeping up through the manhole slot in the curb, while Archie tore around town, shouting the aforementioned, panic-struck sentence. Moose, having finally gotten the concept, complimented Archie on his superior use of the literary device. And Dilton remained in that drain. In response, Archie tore his hair out and said, "Eep."
Then there was the story from Sad Sack where our hero and his fellow soldiers were on bivouac in the wilds and it was raining. The cook was serving homemade soup and told them all to "take all they wanted but eat all they took". The scene pans to Sad Sack, sobbing over his bowl of soup, sitting in the rain. No matter how fast he supped, he could not seem to come to the end of that bowl of soup, as the rain kept refilling it.You guessed it. The story ended with him saying, "Eep."
Suffice to say, Dad probably read those comics hundreds of times and so did we.
I often wonder what would have happened if he had been interested in physics, investing or medical science.
Don't get me wrong. Outside my father's "reading room" I read earlier and more often than most children I knew. In fact, I was considered the smart nerd in my neighbourhood who withstood an onslaught of teasing because of it. I read everything I could get my hands on, from adult novels of questionable origin to a lot of the great classics of English literature. By the time I was 12, I was a regular at our city's library, going there after school, once a week, to get my latest tome. If memory serves me correctly, I retained, at least for a duration, a good deal of what I read, too, because I was always spouting some kind of non-essential stuff to my peers - hence, the torment I suffered at their hands.
So here we are, many years later. Dad is gone to that great bathroom in the sky - I really do hope they have some new editions of Archie up there for him - and I still read a lot of good material. My sixteen-year-old son has an uncanny interest in Archie and the gang - he owns a collection of digests he keeps on the top shelf of his desk in his bedroom but I haven't looked at them at all. Honest.
To top it off, I am a self-avowed word wonk. I am a journalist, editor and writer. I love how the parts of language all flow together; rhythm and sound evolving into symbols that bear relevance for us all.
And yet, what comes out at the point of my greatest frustration?
"Eep."