A friend and I were talking about the gems our friend Rosey comes out with sometimes. I was remembering the time I went to the park with her to feed the ducks.
She came out with a few of her favourite duck jokes. What time does a duck wake up? At the quack of dawn! How do you get down from a duck? On a ladder! Actually she admits that she doesn’t see what’s funny about the second one, but she tells it over and over again because it gets a good laugh! Then she asked me what you call the cat that swallowed a duck. I said I didn’t know, and she told me it was ‘a fat duck filled pus’. I told her I thought that maybe she had got the answer wrong, and the correct one was probably a ‘duck-filled fatty-pus’. She doesn’t understand that one either!
Actually I told her a joke which I thought she might get. There was a shepherd driving along when suddenly he saw the road was blocked. A policeman came up to him and said ‘can you make a U-turn?’ to which the shepherd replied ‘give me five minutes and I’ll make her eyes water’. She didn’t understand of course even when I explained that the shepherd had thought the policeman said ‘ewe’ not U.
Anyway, I digress. There we were throwing bits of bread into the water when suddenly we were approached by a very jolly girl with a huge grin on her face. Actually her face reminded me of a kid’s picture of a smiling sun except that it was pink with very flushed round cheeks. Her ginger hair was in two bunches and she had enormous blue eyes which looked even bigger through her huge round glasses! So as I said, she came up to us then flung her arms in the air and said ‘Hallelujah, I found Jesus’ to which a startled Rosey said ‘Oh good, where was he?’
She does however sometimes come out with some interesting observations. For instance, when we were enjoying a well deserved libation in the Stag Inn the other day she looked at the preserved head of a stag mounted on a wooden shield which hangs on the wall above the fireplace. Such trophies are commonplace around these parts. Rosey asked why it’s considered quite normal to display a dead stags head but not one of your favourite pet dog or your deceased pony. I have to admit that had never occurred to me.
And then there was the time that she purchased a china ornament to send as a birthday present to her aging aunt. It was a hideous thing. Rosey was pretty sure it was a cat, but I reckoned it looked more like a rat. Well, as it was fragile she had to encase it in bubble wrap before parcelling it up and mailing it. She was horrified at the amount she was charged to send it. As we walked down the street we came across a girl selling helium filled balloons with were straining skyward. That made her think. She suggested that if the wrapping she had just used had bubbles filled with helium instead of air her package would have weighed a lot less! So I said to her that if she invented a bra filled with helium, not only would she have increased assets, but she would probably weigh less too!
I then somewhat unwisely moved on to the theory that none of us weighs anything at all. The figure we see when we hop on the scales is merely a measurement of the downward pressure on our body mass caused by gravity, which is why in a zero gravity environment, bodies float weightlessly in the air. I could tell by the puzzled expression on her face that I had completely lost her!
I remember the last thing she said to me that day. It was rather sweet and very Rosey. She said ‘Every day is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.
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