Midlife - The Monday Morning Memo

After being married for 40 years, I took a careful look at my wife one day and said, “Honey, 40 years ago we had a cheap apartment, a cheap car, slept on a sofa bed and watched a 10-inch black and white TV, but I went to bed every night with a hot 25-year-old gal.”

“Now I have a $500,000.00 home, a $45,000.00 car, nice big bed and plasma screen TV, but I’m sleeping with a 65-year-old woman. It seems to me that you’re not holding up your side of things.”

My wife is a very reasonable woman. She told me to go out and find a hot 25-year-old gal and she would make sure that I would once again be living in a cheap apartment, driving a cheap car, sleeping on a sofa bed and watching a 10-inch black and white TV.

Aren’t older women great? They really know how to solve your mid-life crises.

“If wild animals could talk, would they talk like cartoons? Would the dismal swamp resound with shrill, befuddled, childlike voices; a cute choir of cuddly Kermits delivering gentle froggy inanities?

Or would bears converse in the style of Hemingway, in sentences short, brave, and clear; each word a smooth pebble damp with blood; aboriginal speech, he-man speech, an economy of language borrowed by Gary Cooper from frontiersmen who borrowed it from Apache and Ute?

We ask, “Did you see two people pass this way, a man and a woman, walking north?”

The stag shakes its antlers. “Nope,” he says.

“The woman was dark with a ripe body, the man had white in his hair. Sure you didn’t see them?”

“Yep.”

“Well, how about you?” we ask a fox. “Have you seen a couple in Byzantine garb heading in the direction of Bohemia?”

The fox is slow to speak. “Tonight I dined on loon at the pond,” he says. “It was a good meal. Food has an excellent place in my values. Quiet has an excellent place in my values. The forest has been quiet tonight. It is a good thing being a fox when the forest is quiet.”

“We apologize for disturbing your peace, but we’re searching for a husband and wife, racially mixed, and they are either wandering through the woodlands trying to figure out what to do next, or else are making their way by the stars to Bohemia, where the man at one time – longer ago than you might imagine – had an important job and a large family. They may have passed this way.” We pause hopefully.

“The hunt was good,” says the fox. “The moon was right. There was a fresh breeze. A man and a woman would have spooked the loon. What a good thing the forest is when it is left to the fox and the loon.”

Is that the way animals would talk?”

- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, p. 152-153

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