Syd lives by himself in a small house just west of Chicago. He and Harriet bought it a month before they got married. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until Syd came up for air the third Sunday after the wedding, that he realized that English was going to be a serious problem.
Harriet had taken a Teflon trip, k-12, through the Illinois schools. On the other hand, Syd’s parents were English teachers who spoke in complete sentences and semicolons. Syd learned to love reading on his mother’s lap and to use good English over his father’s knee. He compounded this double handicap by going to preppy Andover and then Yale – and then more Yale for a PhD in English literature.
Impressed with their impressive credentials, Miser Industries hired Syd as a Level 2 bookkeeper and Harriet as the face – and body – of their marketing program. The two lovebirds met at the company bowl-a-thon when Syd’s ball landed between Harriet’s gutter guards in the next lane. Despite the fact that Syd’s assets were mostly money and Harriet’s were physical, front-loaded, and round, they immediately connected.
During their six day courtship, Syd was too busy trying to get at her anatomical attributes to notice the English issue. When he found out they would remain untouched until their wedding night, he proposed immediately. Two days later they were married in Las Vegas.
Things went well until their nonstop sex stopped. That’s when the language problem surfaced. It wasn’t the whining tone Harriet used or how she mangled her Rs. It was her all-out assault on tense, syntax, and grammar every time she opened her mouth.
Tensions rose as sex started to slump. In desperation, Syd pulled out a large silk handkerchief and proposed going kinky. Harriet was amenable but surprised when he put it around her mouth instead of her wrists. She spit it out after the first try. “I can’t breathe good. I ain’t doing it.” He tried to get her to wear it when they weren’t having sex, but she balked at that too.
Their relationship limped along until one early spring day when Harriet made 62 grammatical errors in six minutes, ending with “When my Mom told Beth and I that she’d went to the store, I told her I had did that and weren’t doing it again. I’m staying in this here house and laying down.” That was it for Syd, and as it turned out, for Harriet too.
The following Thursday, Syd came to work with a sorrowful face. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I came home Tuesday night and she was gone. No warning, no note, nothing….Even worse, I found find a pair of men’s boxers under the couch, size XL — I’m only an M,” he added to no one’s surprise. Everyone shook their heads and clucked their tongues at the shame of it. Syd just sighed and kept saying over and over, “I wish she were still here.”
Actually, she was – deep beneath the tomatoes in his garden, the dead-end result of that last mangled, mongrel sentence and the rage it engendered in Syd.
Now, every evening in the summer, Syd pours himself a beer, makes a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich on white bread, and goes into the garden. He stops a moment to enjoy the happy scene of thriving vegetables, then walks over to where the tomato plants grow so tall he has to look up to see their tops.
“How do you like laying there, Harriet?” he laughs, then goes in the house to watch TV and have another beer.
Sometimes the house gets lonely without Harriet. Sometimes he regrets what he’s done, but never during tomato season.
Cute!
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