Take Him Away and Feed Him!

Dear John,

 

It was a long day and a good one. I worked for almost nine hours, then Kathy asked me to stay for left-overs and the next segment of Pride and Prejudice. If you haven't seen it or read the book since you left, you really should. You'd love it. Jane Austen wrote your kind of heroine - you know, independent, strong-minded, smart-mouthed women, like the one you married.

 

There was one delightful bit tonight when the cousin has proposed to Elizabeth and she has turned him down, and the household is in hysterics, and a friend offers to ask him to dinner to give them a break. The response is a delight. "Take him away and feed him!" I haven't laughed that hard since my last foray into DYAC.

 

That's exactly the kind of line that you and I would hear once and make a permanent part of the family vocabulary. I can see us muttering it to each other under our breath any time we saw an ill-tempered man. Take him away and feed him! That sums up so much of life, doesn't it?

 

Well, you're not here to mutter this line to. But, in your honor and in recognition of your silent and unseen presence with me, I will mutter it to myself for the rest of my life. Take him away and feed him! I will not promise to behave properly at times when this line would be appropriate. I will giggle to myself, turn red in the face, snort, and, general, make a spectacle of myself. And I will know that you're giggling and snorting with me, but probably not turning red in the face. I'll smile, and know that you are smiling, and we'll share the moment, the humor, and the acknowledgement of our shared human frailty.

 

Take him away and feed him! Tonight I will giggle myself to sleep.

 

Thank you for our shared jokes, and all of our shared years,

Joan.