so there is this old joke it goes like this (most of you have heard it, I'm sure, but it does bear a point):
Small town cafe, same crowd sitting around every day, and a regular brings in a friend from out of town. Everyone is sitting around talking, when someone speaks up and says loudly, "Number 27!" Everyone laughs uproariously. The stranger looks perplexed. Pretty soon someone else speaks up and says, "Number 104!" Again, everyone laughs. Finally the stranger asks his friend who is a local what the deal is. He replies: "The jokes around here are so old that we just give them numbers, so it saves a lot of time telling them. Everybody knows the joke by the number". The out-of-
towner thinks he will give it a shot. He calls out, "number 87!" All you can hear are crickets chirping; no one laughs. He whispers, "is #87 not a very funny joke?" His embarrassed friend replies, "Its not the joke; its how you tell it!"
Which brings me to my point this morning. I was in the boys' room the other morning as Isaiah was doing his daily "chores" which pretty much consist of cleaning up his room. He asked me if I had chores when I was a boy, and I told him that I did. He says "did you have to clean up your room?" I told him no, and as I was gathering my thoughts about how to best describe all the terrible hardships of the gruesome chores that I was required to do, (nearly from birth, of course) and how to describe the burden of carrying up to 30 5 gallon buckets heaping with feed to the calves, morning and night, every day, mostly in the dark, he interrupted my thoughts and said, "Oh, well if you
did have to clean up your room when you were boy, I bet it would have been a really, really, really, REALLY big room, with lots of toys, so it would have been REALLY hard, huh, dad?"
Apparently, he has heard some semblance of the tale of my youth. He really took the wind out of my sails, I just said "yup" and left it at that... from now on, I'll just refer to the story of my chores as "Story #1"
