Maggie and Jiggs
By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male
When we travel I always seem to get a
severe case of gout. I like to think of
it as a genetic flaw gifted to me by one or both of my parents. Ann, my wife, on the other hand, claims that
it is my own fault for living too much like Jiggs, a cartoon character of my
youth. In Wikipedia you will find that Jiggs
was one of the main characters in an influential American cartoon strip called Bringing Up Father which was created
by cartoonist George McManus. It was
distributed by King Features Syndicated
and ran for 87 years from 1913 to the year 2000.
Most people called the strip Maggie and Jiggs after Jiggs the
husband and Maggie, his wife. The humor
centered on Jiggs, an immigrant Irishman whose previous occupation was a hod
carrier but came into wealth in the United States by winning a million dollars
in a sweepstakes. Though newly rich, he
still longed to revert to his working class habits and lifestyle. His constant attempts to sneak out with his
old gang of boisterous, rough-edged pals, eat corned beef and cabbage, and hang
out at the local tavern were often thwarted by his formidable, social-climbing,
rolling-pin wielding, critical and scolding wife who claimed that Jiggs’
constant battle with gout was his own fault, caused entirely by his
uncontrolled lifestyle.
Now I don’t eat corned beef and cabbage,
and I don’t hang out at a tavern.
Neither is Ann a social climber nor does she carry a rolling pin, but
she does claim that my gout is entirely the result of my uncontrolled lifestyle,
just like Jiggs. I tried to explain to
her that gout is simply the result of too much uric acid in my system, a
compound that likely comes from my genes, which makes it my parents’ fault. She immediately responds with her analysis that
there is little difference between the uric acid that I claim causes my gout,
and the carbonic acid that puts the fizz in my favorite pop. “Acid
is acid,” she says, and goes on to remind me that my gout comes as a result
of my poor choices while traveling. And
that is the same argument she has been making for the fifty-nine years we have
been married. Okay, I admit that she is
correct in saying that I drink more pop on the road than I do at any other time,
but I still maintain that Carbonic acid is not Uric acid and fizz is not gout, proving
that the cause for my gout is my parents’ fault, not mine.
I will confess to you, however, that shortly
after starting our current trip I began to feel twinges of gout in my toes. So without telling Ann, I voluntarily switched
from drinking pop to drinking sugar free, carbonation free, pomegranate
flavored water as a possible way of staving off both gout and high blood sugar,
fearing that if Ann found out that I had come down with either she would change
into a rolling pin swinging Maggie. I am
happy to report that my secret switch in drinks did help with the gout. But my blood sugar hit 160 by the second
night of our trip. I still claim it was
not my fault, unless you call stopping twice to have Chinese food where I was
caused by some unknown force to consume several portions of sweetened walnut
shrimp, orange chicken, and sweet and sour pork my fault.
It was what happened at the Chinese
restaurant, however, that caused me to think that Ann just might deserve more
credit for insight and power than I had been giving her. We had been having a vigorous discussion regarding
whether or not my need to purchase an iPhone 6+ to replace my iPhone 5s that is
barely a year old is really a necessity or an extravagance. When the meal was over and we opened our
separate Fortune Cookies, mine said, “LAVISH SPENDING MAY BE DISASTEROUS, BE
CAREFUL.” Ann’s said, “ENJOY
WHAT YOU HAVE, HOPE FOR WHAT YOU WANT.” And I did not make that up. Now
I don’t know if Ann has been outsmarting me because she is smarter than me as
she claims, or because she is a witch that can change the writing on the slip
of paper contained within the cookie while it is still sealed in its package. She admits to being a witch but said that she
is a GOOD witch who is only looking out for my well-being.
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