Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Big Ben

I feel that I need to give equal time to my stepfather, Ben (see post below), so here are a couple of quick stories.

When my mother and Ben got married, it was a simple 15-minute civil ceremony performed by the mayor of our town. Afterwards we went out to the only decent restaurant in town, Molly's Fishmarket. As an aside, they were both in their early 50s at the time.

When our waitress came to take our drink orders, she noticed my folks holding hands. "Oh, how sweet, still holding hands after all this time. How long has it been?" she chirped.

Ben glanced at his watch. "About 20 minutes."

The other story involves a bad habit he had of taking off his glasses and laying them aside when he was doing mechanical, carpentry or plumbing work. (That wasn't his job; he was just very, very handy around the house.)

One time he was working underneath his car, laid his glasses aside, got in the car for a test drive and crunched his glasses. He brought the bag full of pieces to the optometrist.

 "What happened?" the optometrist exclaimed. They were quite likely the most damaged glasses he'd ever seen.

"I ran over them," Ben explained. The optometrist gave him a funny look. So Ben continued: "I wasn't wearing them at the time."

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