The other day I was visiting a school superintendent in his office. He had a sentence written on his chalk board. It simply said, “Woman without her man is nothing.
He said they’ve been asking both male and female employees to put the commas where they thought they should go. He said the results were pretty entertaining. The men pretty much put the commas to make the sentence read like a woman was dependent on a man. The women placed the commas so the sentence read that man was nothing without a woman. Most of the women even argued the entire human race was in trouble without women, according to the sentence.
So, as I was driving home I got me a bright idea. I was going to test this sentence out on some women I knew. My wife for one, but also some of my buddies’ wives and maybe a couple of other women I deal with a lot.
Sure enough, when I got home a had a captive audience of sorts. My wife’s best friend was over at the house looking at the garden. So I read then the sentence, I even had a it written down on a notebook. I couldn’t help but kind of pick at the women and point out how there are several places they could put a comma, or even two commas. The commas change the interpretation of the sentence even though the words are exactly the same.
I showed them how it read that man is the essential theme of the sentence because it is mentioned first. Then I quoted a scripture from the Bible, Ephesians 5:22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. I said that sums it up, because the Bible is never wrong, man is the most important part of that sentence.
I messed up bad, because I was outnumbered. Sure enough my wife’s friend pulled up the Bible on her phone and went to arguing all sorts of scriptures at me. My wife got kind of quiet and sort of shot green eye daggers out of her eyes at me. I also knew she was thinking of all the stuff she’d do to prove her point. It was almost dinner time and my first thoughts were I guess I’m going to starve.
Now, I’m a manly man, and even though I knew I had opened a can of worms I didn’t just cow down like a whipped puppy. As the evening went by I would get a gig in every chance I could.
We started making dinner and we were doing ok. My wife said something about vegetables from the garden and meat from a calf. Then she handed me an apple and asked me to slice it really thin to put on top of the salad. I probably shouldn’t have said it, but I thought it was funny, “Eve are you sure this fruit isn’t forbidden?” My wife’s name isn’t Eve. I was referring to the Garden of Eden and the fruit from the forbidden tree.
In the flash of a millisecond, my wife went from having a pretty good time fixing dinner to shooting me with those green eye daggers again, what’s worse is that she was smiling. I thought oh boy, she’s really going to get me.
Surprisingly she didn’t, at least not until we sat down at the table. It was then she started asking the blessing. Usually her prayers are short and sweet. Today though, she prayed about the book of Proverbs and asked that I be reminded that the longest proverb in the entire book of Proverbs is a list of all the good things a good wife does. She ended her prayer by asking that her husband be reminded of the Proverb about even a fool appears wise when he keeps his mouth shut.
I guess that her praying helped, because she didn’t shoot green eye daggers at me as we ate dinner and I kind of kept quiet the rest of the evening. Shoot, I even did the dishes. As I was doing the dishes I realized that the school superintendent didn’t have to live with any of those people he put that question too………
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.
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