Today is My Former Husband's Birthday

This date always puts me in a mood. Sometimes to celebrate, sometimes to ask myself, "whatever were you thinking, woman?"

In honor of the occasion, here are two jokes. The first one was carried home recently from work by The Baron:

Q: Why is divorce so expensive?

A: Because it is worth it.

Oh, it is. It so very much is. Of course it leaves your children in tatters. But no one tells you that; and sometimes it's a question of tatters there or tatters here.

But it's over. Thank you, Lord. Please put that on my Gratitude List for today.

The second joke is from Joe Katzman:

In Jerusalem, a female CNN journalist hears about a very old Jewish man who has been going to the Wailing Wall to pray twice a day, everyday, for a long, long time. So she goes to check it out. She goes to the Wailing Wall, and, sure enough, there he is! She watches him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turns to leave, she approaches him for an interview.

"I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. Sir, how long have you been coming here to pray at the Wailing Wall?"

-- "Almost 40 years. Twice per day, every day."

"40 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?"

-- "I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews, and Muslims. I pray for all the hatred to stop. I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship."

"And how do you feel after doing this for 40 years?"

-- "It's like I'm talking to a frickin' wall!

Now that's a joke I would enjoy telling my former mother-in-law. What with her being an old and ailing agnostic, Rose likes opportunities to laugh. Unfortunately one of the family "secrets" is that her father, Grandpa Jake, was a German Jew who married an Irish Catholic and 'converted.'

Ha. In a pig's eye he did. Grandpa Jake just decided to marry that pretty Irish girl and so he did whatever it was they told him to do in order to have her. South Boston, being the anti-Semitic bastion of Irish ignorance that it was back then made it even more politic for Grandpa to 'pass' -- and so he did. And so his children were instructed to tell no one; being obedient, they kept the family faith. In the end what happened was that all the children's children knew anyway because people always tell those things. But that original generation, my mother-in-law and her sibs, never knew that we all knew and were rather admiring of the fact. The rest of us were so boringly Irish that Grandpa's genes provided some badly needed balance.

Which brings me to my third and longest favorite joke. When Richard Pryor was first starting out, just barely on Ed Sullivan, he told this one:

Q: What happens when you eat Chinese and German food together?

A: An hour later, you're hungry for power.

Enjoy this expensive day. I certainly will for the Baron's Boy beautiful friend, Maria, is coming to visit. At the very least I will clean up the slatternly Irish house in her honor. I think she's of Austrian extraction, but I'm not sure.

The gene pool continues its incredible American experiment.