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A little old man in a little stone house in a little village in Wisconsin woke on a winter’s morning when just a little light from the dawn had begun to leak past blinds on the windows on the north and west walls of the bedroom. The old man pulled the comforter up to his chin and lay still and quiet awhile but eventually perceived that his wife, not quite as little and seemingly not nearly as old, in bed beside him, had also awakened.
“Good morning, darlin,” said the man.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” replied the wife.
“Are you thinking,” asked the man, trying to be funny, “the same thing that I am thinking?”
“What specifically,” asked the wife, “are you thinking?”
“I am thinking,” said the man, “that our basement floor could use a new coat of paint, and it will not happen anytime soon because we have so much stuff down there that we would have to move aside and then move it all back again.”
“Hmm,” said the wife. “Or we could get rid of it.”
The husband did not reply.
Then the wife said, “No, I was not thinking what you just said. I was thinking about one time, when I got out of the Army, back from Germany, got home to New York, and my sister-in-law Cindy heard that a department store in town was hiring models, and she wanted me to go down there with her, and I didn’t want to, I had no interest in that, but she kept after me and kept after me, and finally I said okay, and we went. And they sent Cindy home, but they asked me to come back again. She was so mad. I was probably a hundred and twenty pounds, maybe not even that. She was bigger and she was mad. Cindy said, ‘You just wait. Someday you are going to be thirty years old and your ass will be hanging down to your knees!’”
“Wow,” said the man, warm in the bed, covers still pulled up to his bearded chin. “Wow,” he said once more. “I don’t even know what that means!”
The man and his wife held hands and lay in bed, quiet and still. More daylight seeped through the venetian blinds. Then the man said, “Well, dear, whatever that means, I am glad it has not yet happened to you!”
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