Now Hear This: Some things I just can’t figure out
Things I can’t figure out:
• Why a hospital room costs $400 a day. And for that price here’s what you get: One roll-up bed with rails. One metal night stand with cheap tissues. One hard-to-get-comfortable-in chair, and one overhead TV with only eight channels, minus ESPN, of course. Not to mention the cold tile floor, and a view that looks worse than you do.
• When you’re being X-rayed and the nurse tells you to take a deep breath, and hold it. Hold what?
• How does a thermos know?
• Why the IRS won’t send me an itemized statement of how they spend my money?
• Somebody please explain the automobile insurance deductible to me. Why do I have to pay $500 before my insurance company will pay a dime?
• How a baseball player can strike out seven out of 10 times, and get paid millions!
• They make cars go 120 mph, and the speed limit is 75.
• Why they haven’t put “roll-bars” in our cars like they do in NASCAR.
• Why people who go on diets get fat again.
• What’s wrong with Mike Tyson’s brain, and Michael Jackson’s nose?
• The idiots who put all that “porn” on the Internet so kids can see it.
• Why we don’t have prayer in schools, and pay teachers, policeman and fireman more.
• How geese mate for life, and will die for each other, while people just die to mate.
• Why restaurant “specials of the day” aren’t written on a separate menu. I wouldn’t have to ask the waiter to repeat them several times. And it would save me the embarrassment of asking how much.
• How a parrot can learn to talk, and a dog can’t.
• Why some men insist on wearing really bad toupees, and elderly women like blue hair.
Now for the few things I have figured out, and the price I had to pay:
• I learned the only two words you need to know to have a happy marriage – “yes dear.” But it took awhile.
• That I am the boss of my house, except when my wife is home.
• When someone gives you something don’t immediately respond, “Oh, you shouldn’t have.” Take it with graciousness and say, “Thank you.” The same goes for a compliment.
• That your future is not the product of your past.
• That every dog has his day – if he’s willing to wait long enough.
• The time I wasted on me was time I could have given to someone else.
•?That love means never having to say you’re sorry.
• That many things in life will catch your eye. But only a few will catch your heart.
• I am smarter than my dog except when he is trying to tell me something.
• That I can never make the “last minute” any longer than it already is.
And, finally I have learned what novelist Ernest Hemingway once said about the essence of life. “The simplest things in life are the most difficult to learn,” Hemingway said, “And time, which is all we have, must be paid dearly for its acquiring.”
(Hope Hines is a television sports reporter and a Nashville personality.)