God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (6 page)

What do men want? They want a lot of and

they wish people wouldn't get so mad at them. Why are so many people getting divorced today? It's because most of us don't have extended families It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The

Kennedys.

But most of

if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the

The groom gets

one more

but it's a

The woman gets one

more person to talk to about everything, but it's a When a couple has an argument, they may think it's about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:

"You are not enough

I met a man in Nigeria one time, an

who had six

hundred relatives he knew quite

His wife had just

had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was

to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and

'

say how pretty it was, or handsome.

Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby? This rambling introduction is four times as long as the most efficient, effective piece of writing in the history of the English-speaking world, which was Abraham Lincoln's address on the battlefield at Gettysburg.

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