Marry a woman with brains enough for two and you’ll come out even!
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Don’t mess with seniors …
We went to breakfast at a restaurant where the “seniors’ special” was two eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast, for $1.99.
Mary and John, both elders, were at the table next to us. I heard Mary say, “The special sounds good, but I don’t want the eggs.”
“Then I’ll have to charge you $2.49 because you’re ordering al-la-carte,” the waitress replied.
“You mean I’ll have to pay for not taking the eggs?” Mary said incredulously. “Then I’ll take the special.”
“How do you want your eggs?”
“Raw and in the shell.”
She took the eggs home.
Happy Valentine’s from Murray.
An honest woman won’t take the gift if she don’t take the man.
An Alcan Valentine’s tale
The above story is hardly your usual Valentine’s wish, yet it came on Valentine’s Day with Murray’s subtle message two years ago. “Remember the good old days?” he was asking.
Their story reflects the attitudes of a practical, down-to-earth generation. Straightforward, straight-talking, without-window-dressing were their calling cards. All elements essential for the pursuit of love and happiness in a bare-bones northern community.
It’s the bare bones of a northern Valentine’s love story — a Valentine’s card for the world.
A love story which began and flourished in a bush town; a wedding bereft of frills and flamboyance; a honeymoon, of all places, in Canada, and almost within shouting distance of home, followed by more than 50 years of married life in northern and western Canada.
Yet despite its humble beginnings, which were replicated by a large percentage of the Second World War generation, it was an event worth talking about, and worth remembering.
The highway was almost as new as their love. They met and courted at mile 300; they married at mile 20; travelled south in the back seat of the best man’s black ’48 Dodge, with a three-year-old redhead enamoured of the groom who sat on his lap most of the way.
They ate their wedding dinner in Grande Prairie with the redhead, who wanted to sleep with them too, and her Mom and Dad.
They honeymooned in Alberta, and they meant what they said to friends and family that day in the early 1950s “until death us do part.”
It did! Last year he left us, though the love and the memory remain as steadfast as the day it began.
It was a quiet wedding, yet stands more than five decades later as proof that as wonderful and colourful as frills may be, they do not a life-long marriage make. Love does!
Never trust a man who can look a pretty woman in the eye.
Oh remember the valentines you received as children at school from “a secret admirer?” Well George got one, in a woman’s hand, which read, “I’ll be your concubine, if you’ll be my valentine,” and he’s been looking for her ever since. (We’ll never tell, will we Ray?)
Ladies remember: “A man who tells you he’s no fool has his suspicions,” and fella’s, remember: “You can’t be hurt by words you don’t say.”
A toast to women: For each of them who makes a fool out of a man, there is another who makes a man out of a fool.
A tip of the hat to love!
(The Savvy Sayings used in bold print today come from a book of cowboy talk with the same name by Ken Balstad.)