“I got married.”
“That’s good.”
“Well, it ain’t too good. She’s awful ugly.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Well, it ain’t too bad. She’s got a lot of money.”
“That’s good.”
“Well it ain’t too good. She’s awfully stingy.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Well it ain’t too bad. She did buy me a house.”
“That’s good.”
“Well it ain’t too good. It done burned down.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Well it ain’t too bad. She was in it.”
DID YOU EVER stop to think how your life too is a series of goods/bads, ups/downs, highs/lows?
One of my recent “downs” occurred when What’s Her Name and I were guests at an Optimist Club meeting. It was either Charles Graves or Tom Caldwell (old age memory precludes remembering which) who asked What’s Her Name from the podium what her reaction was to the things I said about her in Funny Female Foibles.
I don’t know. I haven’t read it,” was her perfidious reply.
Fortunately I had a recent “up” that helped counterbalance WHN’s back stabbing. My kids, Janet and Bob Ballou, and Nancy Watson took me to Chicago to see a Cubs’ baseball game. My Cubs lost again, of course, but the “up” occurred the night before when we went to a Chinese Restaurant. I was amazed at how perceptive the Chinese are, when my fortune cookie at the end of the meal read:
“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together as they do in you.” My question was the same as the young lad’s who said he couldn’t understand thermos bottles.
“You put something hot in it, and it keeps it hot. You put something cold in it and it keeps it cold. How do it know?!” In the same vein, how did the fortune cookie know how to describe me so accurately?
ANOTHER recent “high” was meeting for the first time, and spending an evening with Lee and Jackie Walburn. I had always admired his journalistic skills as editor of Atlanta Magazine, and before that as a sports writer. When I discovered (not from him—he’s too modest) that he had won more than 200 awards, I was impressed even more.
His bride, Jackie Miller Walburn, is famous in her own right. She still holds all the basketball scoring records at Armuchee High School and at West Georgia College. Lee was also a star basketballer at West Georgia, and one night bet her he’d score more points in his game than she would in hers, with the loser having to buy dinner.
“I had 13 points tonight,” he asked some one after the game. “How many did Miller have?”
“52,” was the reply.
Which shows even sharp guys can have “lows.
IT’S A GOOD IDEA to learn to accept your “up” experiences that you get credit for, even when you really don’t deserve them.
“The reason I came to you for my eye exam is the wonderful job you did on my mother 20 years ago,” Mrs. Ima Grateful told me when I was still in practice. “You did such a good job, that she got to where she could read without glasses for the first time in many years.”
If this had happened to me when I was young and stupid, I probably would have felt it morally and ethically wrong to accept such undeserved praise. I undoubtedly would have bored her with a lengthy and dull explanation of how it wasn’t my skill, but instead the “second sight” phenomenon that had been responsible
But I found I had mellowed with age, and figured I had caught enough hell for things that hadn’t been my fault, that this might be God’s way of helping to even the score. So I modestly and humbly mumbled that her mother’s reading vision might possibly have improved, even without my optometric skills.
I ALWAYS ADMIRED the “up” of being triumphant in a war of words. As in the story of the little old man in a restaurant.
“Taste the soup,” he said to the waiter.
“Is it too hot?”
“Taste the soup.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Taste the soup.”
“Okay, okay!” said the waiter. “Where’s the spoon?”
“Ah—HAH!” said the diner.
We all have ‘downs’ along the way. The only exception I ever heard¸ was when the preacher in his sermon said that no one was perfect, that everyone had sinned at one time or another.
“Is there anyone here who can honestly say they’re perfect in everything they do?”
One old gentleman in the congregation stood up.
“Do you maintain that you’ve led a perfect life?” asked the preacher.
“No sir,” he replied. “I’m just standing to represent my wife’s first husband.”
Jack Runninger of Rome is a retired optometrist and state and national award-winning humor columnist. His most recent book, “Funny Female Foibles,” is available now. Readers may contact him at runningerj@comcast.net.
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