Stop Beating Around the Bush

I’m fixing to stop beating around the bush.
I think I’ve been beating around the bush all my life. It started back when I was just a young boy in the first grade. During mid-morning recess we were allowed to eat a snack—a piece of cake, cookies, or other goodies we had brought from home.

On one occasion my cousin, Conway, had brought a big slice of chocolate cake wrapped in waxed paper. After he had finished devouring the cake, he had passed the wrapper across from his desk to my eagerly awaiting hand.

My teacher, Ms. Hambrick, approached me as I was licking the icing off the slick paper and asked me if I had brought anything from home for recess.

In between licks I told her, yes ma’am, that I had brought this piece of waxed paper covered with delicious chocolate icing.

She hadn’t asked me which home it had come from so I felt comfortable telling her this. What I was doing was beating around the bush to hide the fact that we were too poor to afford niceties like chocolate cake for recess.

When I got to high school I found myself a girl friend, who insisted on a daily basis, that I tell her she was the prettiest girl in school. By then I had gotten quite good at beating around the bush, and being basically honest, proceeded to beat around the bush by telling her she had nice eyes and a fascinating smile.

Uncle Sam came calling soon afterwards, and there was no beating around the bush when it came to the military draft. But by then I was practically an expert at beating around the bush and wound up pushing a typewriter rather than being out in the bush where the fire fights raged.

Next thing I knew I was beating around the bush in the corporate world explaining why sales quotas weren’t achieved and why budgets were never in line. And I was quite good at it and prospered.

But recently, I decided that at this point in my life I was just going to quit beating around the bush and tell it like it is. I had real good intentions of doing this until my wife asked me how I felt about a few things.

Since then, I’ve had second thoughts and I think I’m fixing to just keep on beating around the bush for a while yet.