Musing Of A Muddled Male

Cow Magnets 

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

        I have a pair of cow magnets that I keep around to remind myself that opposites attract. 

        Cow magnets, in case you are a city slicker, are magnetic-metal cylinders with smooth round ends to make them easy to swallow.  Dairy farmers feed them to their milk cows to collect any bits of barbed wire, nails, or bailing wire the cow might ingest when eating. 

        If you try to orient two cow magnets side by side with north-pole to north-pole and south to south they will push away from each other.  If, instead, you orient them north to south they can hardly be pulled apart. 

        Today Ann, my wife, asked me why I thought we managed to stay together after nearly sixty years when we see things in completely different ways.  She didn't smile when I said, "I guess we are just a couple of old, properly oriented cow magnets." 

        Have you ever found yourself arguing passionately with your spouse about some really important thing only to find later, once you begin speaking again, that while you thought you were arguing about the same thing you had actually been on two different subjects? 

        Take reading things on the internet, for example.  Ann hates computers, but she likes to read, so when I am looking at something newsworthy on the internet Ann will stand behind me and read over my shoulder. 

        I have a habit of skimming when I read.  Ann savors the detail and wants to ponder every word.  So when I scroll to the next paragraph before she is done with the one we were just reading she will say, "Move it up. Move it up."  Now to an Engineer "moving it up" means that you want the page moved up so that you can read further down the page, which is what I just did and I tell her so.  But when Ann says, "Move it up," what she really means is move the writing up which means that I have to move the page down so that she can read higher on the page where we just were, "And that, officer, is why we are shouting." 

        I suppose that you heard the story about the man and his wife who were in the middle of an argument when the man, in exasperation, said to his wife, “I don't know how you can be so beautiful and so dumb all at the same time.”  The wife responded with, “God made me beautiful so that you would be attracted to me, and made me dumb so that I would be attracted to you.”  And no, I haven’t heard Ann say that yet, although she may have considered it more than once.

        I thought of that story the other day when wondering why anyone would ever think that women are the weaker sex.  I knew that wasn’t possible when Ann challenged me to take a turn and have the next baby.