"Navy Talk"

The mother of a friend of ours had remarried, awhile back, to a retired Navy man. He had never given up the “Navy Way” and continually used Navy terminology in his everyday conversation,

His wife put up with this as long as she could until, after a few drinks at a party one night, she brought him up short by saying , “I don’t mind it when you call the floor, the “deck”, and the wall the “bulkhead, but I’ll be dammed if I’m, going to pipe you aboard!”

Private Joke

My wife had just come home from having major cancer surgery on her mouth. She temporarily required feeding of a nutritional supplement by means of a nose tube to her stomach. One day, a good friend of hers came by for a visit while I was getting ready to fix her “evening meal”. While they were talking, I called in from the kitchen to ask (our private joke) if she wanted steak or lobster and she answered, “I’ll have steak, I had lobster last night”. She and her friend kept right on talking while setting up the apparatus for feeding her.

About a week later, the friend returned to see my wife again. During the week, her elderly mother had come for a visit and she told us that her mother had also need a nutritional supplement . She had gone to the drug store and inquired about the brand we used. Apparently “our private joke” had completely gone over head, as she complained, “All they had was chocolate, strawberry and vanilla.

"Beatle Fan"

The little girl next door was an avid “Beatle” fan, both of the shaggy-haired and the crawling type. She was as happy with her record collection as she was with her bug collection. I was very surprised, therefore, to see her looking so sad and on the verge of tears one day that I asked her what was wrong.

“My praying mantis just died”, she said sadly.

“Oh, that’s too bad”, I said consoling her. “How long did you have it?”

“Twenty minutes”, she said