Crushed
Ego
By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male
It has been a particularly rough week for
your friend the Muddled Male. No, I
didn’t have a root canal, and I certainly didn’t get another speeding ticket,
since I now drive the legal speed no matter the urgency of the trip. My goal is to avoid another $165 speeding
ticket even if Ann, my wife, is in the middle of labor, which luckily she isn’t,
and I have to rush her to the geriatric maternity ward. I might make an exception if I am asked to be
the judge at a French fry cooking contest and am running late, but anything
else will have to wait until I can get there at or below the legal speed.
My rough week occurred as I was
participating in a planning meeting for a Church activity. All went smoothly until the duties were to be
assigned to various participating groups.
Bring the food, check. Reserve the park, check. Line up the
games, check. Cook the hamburgers and hot dogs……no
response. And then my friend RA looked
right at me and said, “Let’s have the
little guys do the barbecuing.” Now
I must admit that age may have caused me to shrink a bit, as it has many of the
guys in the group I represent, but really, little
guys? Well, I accepted the
assignment, but my ego was crushed and I decided that I needed to have an eye
to eye talk with RA about her obvious and unfair bias caused, I felt, by the
fact that she is tall. Statuesque, I
think is the word.
So, as the meeting ended I followed RA
into the hallway, stood on my tip-toes, stretched to stand as tall as I
possibly could, and found that I could look her in the chin, but not her
eye. The only thing I had left was to
jump as I made my point. [Jump] “I” [Jump] “am” [Jump] “not” [Jump] “a” [Jump] “little” [Jump] “guy!”
Well by now I was out of breath and passed out. I came to long enough to see the flashing
lights and hear one of the Medics say to the doctor on the other end of the
radio, “We are bringing in a little guy
who passed out from oxygen deprivation.
It is almost like he was doing something stressful at an altitude where
he should have been on oxygen.” As
they put me on the stretcher I tried to cry out, “It’s the tall lady’s fault. And
I am not a little guy,” but I was out of breath.
Ed: Note: And RA's little daughter asked if she could bring cookies to the people on Old People's Hill which actually happens to be where the Muddled Male lives...as do I, hmmm.
