“Sherwood, my darling of thirty plus years, we need a ‘safe word.’”

“Okay. Why? Hunh?”

My husband never complicates our conversations with excessive word usage.

“Because, love of my life, the news reports are claiming that it’s all the rage. According to a best selling—so it must be good—book that is making its author one million dollars every twelve and a half minutes, we are supposed to be tying each other up and spanking each other with switches.”

“Why?”

“For fun.”

He may have shrugged. The weirdo lights of four separate computer monitors cast a sluggish shadow over his shoulders so it was hard to tell. I continued trying to bring my beloved up to date on the latest pop culture phenomenon celebrated by our society—fifty shades of hanky panky kink. Although, even as I type this, I realize it’s probably not all that new of an idea and that cave dudes were probably dragging cave chicks around by their ponytails long before the literary world fell over the cutting edge of really icky writing.

“And apparently when you get annoyed by being tied up and switched, you yell the safe word and then the other person has to knock it off.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” he said, while lights flickered across his rumpled forehead.

“Well, I don’t want to be the only kids on the block without a safe word, so I’ve come up with one. The word is scat. It’s a perfect word. It means move on along and animal dung. How about that?”

He scribbled something on a sticky note.

Later we took the safe word out for a test drive.

With a wicked Simon Legree gleam in his eye, my husband tipped his desk chair back and said, “Hey, babe, why don’t you come on over here and . . .”

“Scat,” I said.

“Come on babe, let’s . . .”

“Scat.”

“Babe?”

“Scaaaat.”

See how safe a safe word can be? It’s amazing. Works every time.

Actually, we’re way too old fashioned to need a safe word. Not so old fashioned as to be clubbing each other with tree limbs, but you know, old fashioned. We’re still crazy about each other without requiring props.

I’ve always said that true love is the face you see when you wake up from general anesthesia, and not the face you see coming at you with flex cuffs. I just added that last part to be cutting edge and relevant.