years?”

“Probably,” I said, “it’s because in today’s world, ‘The Little Red Hen’ is not barnyard correct. Can you imagine how the story would go today? The little red hen would fi nd the wheat and plant it and grind it into flour and bake the bread. Then she’d go, ‘Cluck, cluck!’ and refuse to share the bread with the other animals.”

“And . . .?” my wife said.

“And then the government would take her to court and threaten her with jail unless she shared her bread with the dog and the pig and so on.”

“But she would have shared the bread,” my wife said, “if the other animals had shared the work.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m glad I’ve found the story again.”

“It’s a shame,” she said. “I think our kids and their kids have never read it.”

“They’ll read it now,” I said. “The Book of Virtues was under their trees at Christmas.”

“And,” my wife said, “maybe we should urge the schools to put ‘The Little Red Hen’ back into the fi rst-grade readers.”

“Fat chance,” I said. “Imagine how they’d tell the story for today’s kids. ‘The little red hen goes, “Hey, man, like, who’s gonna help me, like, reap this wheat?” And the pig goes, like, “Not me, man!” So, the little red hen petitions the Department of Agriculture, and the government, like, grants her a subsidy, and she never bakes any more bread.’”

“So, after that all the animals go hungry?” my wife said.

“Oh, no!” I said. “We will elect Bernie Sanders President and there will be free food for all and no one will ever have to work again.”

—CC—

And last of all I can

certainly identify with

Melva Hunter who shared

the following. . .

Should I Join

Facebook?

When I bought my Blackberry, I thought about the 30-year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a cell phone that plays music, takes videos, pictures and communicates with Facebook and Twitter.

I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grand kids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I fi gured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.

My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation.

I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.

The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Bluetooth [it’s red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife and everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. I had to take my hearing aid out to use it, and I got a little loud.

I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside that gadget was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, ‘Re-calc-u-lating.’ You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then if I made a right turn instead. Well, it was not a good relationship.

When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GPS lady, at least she loves me.

To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for 4 years, but I still haven’t fi gured out how I can lose three phones all at once and have to run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.

The world is just getting too complex for me.

They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store.

You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden “Paper or Plastic?” every time I check out just knocks me for a loop. I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused, but I never remember to take them with me.

Now I toss it back to them.

When they ask me, “Paper or Plastic?” I just say, ‘Doesn’t matter to me. I am bi-sacksual.’ Then it’s their turn to stare at me with a blank look.

Submitted by Melva

Hunter, New Braunfels,

TX