The Things We Do For Love

Saturday, butterflies fluttered in our garden. Birds flocked to the feeders. Flowers bloomed. The pool sparkled. Weather balmy – so how did we spend the day?

Inside cloth stores!

First, we bought some new glasses for Ginny.

Then she wanted to buy some new dresses for the office.

We walked around the corner to this cloth store and read the sign in the window. It was actually etched into the glass. It said:

Custom Clothier & Personal Image Consultants.
By Appointment Only.

Ginny, Thank God, had NOT made an appointment, so we drove to this other cloth store that peddles women’s dresses. There, in only four and a half hours of shopping, Ginny bought two dresses.

Yes, two dresses in only 4 ½ hours!

I stood around the cloth-selling store trying not to look like a dork. There was one other male person in that store. I had the distinct impression that he was there selecting dresses for himself.

Once we finally got home, we watched a tv movie.

A real movie.

Friday night Ginny had picked the movie, one of those noble adultery films about this dorky writer who leaves his wife when he finds inspiration in the arms of his muse, a widow with kids, but she croaks saddling him with four brats to raise.

Ginny teared up over this lovely tale.

But tonight we got to see Armageddon with Bruce Willis. And these taxi cabs blow up and tumble through the air and land on top of other cars. And meteors smash into New York City. And the Pentagon scrambles jets. And Godzilla steps on this traffic cop and squishes his guts out. And these astronauts, who are really common everyday joes working on an oil rig, blow up a Russian space station, and two U.S. space shuttles, and six or eight more taxi cabs, and an asteroid -- And they save the world for the exotic dancer they’d met in a bar the night before they blasted off.

Ginny did not tear up over this lovely movie.

But she watched it with me anyhow.

Ah, the things we do for love!

Now, the movie Armageddon presents a slightly different worldview from mine but I enjoyed it anyhow. One thing I didn’t care for was the general’s references to a “biblical” end of the world.

Many years ago I wrote a regular series of religious humor columns for a newspaper. One of these was titled, “The Party At The End Of The World”.

This article so offended one religious group that they sent a delegation of clergy to protest to the newspaper’s owner. He immediately cancelled my column and assigned me back to writing obituaries for the next couple of years.

That wasn’t as much fun as writing a regular column; but it was not the end of the world.

Not a single taxi cab blew up.