A recent panel of the daily comic strip The Lockhorns depicts the wife saying to the husband, with a knowing smile, “Of course I understand you, Leroy – what would you like to know?”
The natural restorative faculties are double-edged swords. Although their natural tendency is to fight illness and infection, they can also bring about new harm. Excessive fever and inflammation may cause organ damage and death.
I wrote this little fable in the style of the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress some years ago to dispel the oppression incident to the writing of a book review.
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So it went for years: Every summertime when school was out, almost every day, the little girl ran down the hill to see my wife. She taught the child how to bake and sweep a floor, showed her how to say grace before a meal, encouraged her to read and work hard at school, gave her snacks when she helped with the chores, and sat in the wicker chair and talked with her.
The writer doesn’t say so, but I think she was responding in part to the post “Punishing Singles.”
One of the more illuminating incidents of my life was to be asked to share a freshly baked cake from a wood-burning oven in a house with cardboard walls, cellophane windows, and a tarpaper roof.
My wife’s early experience of life was a good deal broader than mine. We were visiting one of her childhood friends.
A few years ago, one of my daughters thanked me just because I had never broken up with her mother, as so many of her friends’ dads did. She said that when she was growing up, she always knew she never had to worry about that happening, because we had said so.
It was a sweet moment, but also a strange one, as though she had warmly thanked me for never starving her to death.
Protesting the classical understanding of marriage, a young man said to me, “What two guys have with each other is the same as what I have with my wife.”
I take him at his word. If he insists that what he and the young woman “have with each other” has nothing to do with the polarity and complementarity of the sexes, who am I to insist that it does?
