The long marriage of a middle-aged farm couple was growing more and more contentious. Their constant sniping at each other was more and more agitating. One area of disagreement wuz housekeeping by the wife.
Finally, the arguing reaches a head. The wife bluntly tells her husband that if he walks across the kitchen floor after she mops again, she’s going to kill him.
So, the next time she mops the kitchen floor, hubby comes into the house from choring and blatantly and defiantly stomps across the kitchen floor again. He gets the floor dirty, tracks water into the living room, and plops himself down into his recliner in front of the TV.
His wife decides to do as she had promised. Without saying a word, she goes to their bedroom, gets his pistol out of the closet, and shoots him dead in his recliner.
Then, she calls 911 and reports, “I told my husband that if he walks through the kitchen after I mopped and the floor isn’t dry yet, I would kill him. He didn’t listen, and I shot him.”
The sheriff’s emergency dispatcher immediately sends an ambulance for the husband, and a squad car to arrest the wife.
The sheriff overhears about the call shortly afterward, thinks it’s a rather strange crime, so he drives to the farm house.
When he gets there, his deputies are still waiting outside. He asks the officers, “Why haven’t you gone inside and arrested the woman?”
They sheepishly reply, “Sir, we can’t go in now. The kitchen floor is still wet.”
***
The gab at the Old Geezers’ morning gabfest frequently turns to local history. One morning this week, the conversation turned to recalling the last blacksmith doing bizness in downtown Riley. He apparently wuz a real eccentric character and sort of an odd ball, too.
He’d been in bizness for a long time and his blacksmith shop wuz best described as “random clutter” from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall, and from back door to sidewalk. He never threw anything away because, as he self-explained, “I never know when I’ll need something again.”
However, in spite of his oddities, Smitty wuz a skillful craftsman and given enuf time could solve about any blacksmithing problem customers could bring to his door.
The morning kibitzers recalled one time an old customer came to the blacksmith shop, took a casual glance at the cluttered-up appearance, turned to the owner and asked with a tinge of sarcasm, “Smitty, how long you been working in this place?”
“Oh, I’d reckon about 20 years now,” Smitty replied.
“No way,” the customer corrected. “I know you’ve been here a lot longer than that.”
“But, you asked how many years I’ve been working here,” Smitty countered. “And, I reckon I’ve been working about 20 years, and the rest of the time I’ve spent looking for the right tools to get the work done.”
***
The local funeral home is in the process of building a new structure, which, when completed, will house an up-to-snuff cremation facility. Learning that fact, prompted my old mind to recall this story that I used to tell to audiences back in my public entertaining days. Here’s the story:
A woman, in her eighties, made the evening news because she was getting married for the fourth time.
The day following her marriage, she was being interviewed by a local TV station. The young reporter asked her what it felt like to be married again at her advanced age —
and would she share information about her three previous marriages?”
It seemed quite unique, to the reporter, that the newlywed’s new husband was a funeral director. She asked the newlywed, “Tell me about your new husband, and about your first three marriages, too.”
After a short time to contemplate the question, the new bride broke into a big smile. She proudly explained that she had first married a banker when she was in her twenties. In her forties she married a circus ring master, In her sixties she married a pastor, and now in her eighties, a funeral director.
The amazed reporter asked her how she happened to have married men with such diverse careers.
With a smile on her face, the new bride explained, “I married one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go!”
***
Words of wisdom for the week: “Be sure to ask your doctor if a drug with 32 pages of possible side-effects is really what you need to cure you.”
“How did we oldsters survive our childhoods when our mothers cleaned our faces with spit on a handkerchief and not an anti-bacterial wipe.”
“I wanna be 14 years old again and ruin my life differently. I have new ideas on how to do it.”
Have a good ‘un.
