In Which I Tell The duck story.

This is a story that has become a legend in my family. It is a tale that will be passed down from father to son through the ages.

Many, many moons ago, in the time of High School Reunions, I fell in love with a fair, young maiden. She was beautiful, funny, intelligent and had a kiss you would die for. But, like many relationships, we had our moments, especially when it came to sleeping arrangements. My fair maiden had the habit of stealing the covers as well as the majority of the bed. Of course, we would start out the evening with an equal share of bedspace, in accordance with God's plan (1 Thebidia 12:2-4), but during the night, I would awake shivering to find my blankets gone and my body about ready to fall off the edge of the bed.

(Note to my impressionable readers, no unseemly activities happened on that bed. We merely played rigorous games of "chess" or slept. After long days of building homes for Habitat for Humanity, feeding the poor at the Soup Kitchen and teaching adults how to read, we would come home exhausted and since my house only had three bedrooms we had no choice but to share the one bed.)

On one particular evening, I awoke cold and about to meet the floor up close. I turned to see my fair maiden sprawled across the bed and with my voice full of love, I hollered "you're hogging the bed."

She bellowed back, with a voice one uses to calm frightened children, "you have just as much room as I do."

At this, my heart was so overflowing with concern for my fair maiden's spatial awareness, that I lept from the bed. Now, at the time, I had a set of sheets that had vertical rows of ducks on them. How fortunate, in that I could demonstrate in clear, impartial terms just how much bed she had. "You have seven ducks, I have three ducks!" By this point, my voice was so poetic and loving that if my words were cartoons, they would be made of butterflies and flowers.

Having the facts pointed out in such a loving and kind manner, since nothing says "I love you" more than cold, hard science, my fair maiden relinquished her excess ducks and we spent the remainder of the night in loving repose.

Cut to a month or so later when I hosted Thanksgiving dinner at my home. Not only was this the first time I hosted Thanksgiving, it was the first chance my family had to meet my fair maiden. The evening was going fine, until halfway through dinner, when my fair maiden told the above tale. Followed immediately by the part of the Sprint commercial where the pin drops.

Now, it's not that my family were particularly uptight or conservative. It wasn't that it was such a shocking story. But, it's one thing for your parents to be philosophically aware that you're playing "chess," it's quite another to be confronted with the fact that their son is, indeed, playing "chess" and he's playing it with this woman in front of them. It's just the reverse of children thinking about their parents playing "chess." You know your mom and dad played "chess" but you don't really want to hear about all the moves that lead up to checkmate.

The rest of the evening went fine. My fair maiden and I eventually drifted apart, but remain good friends to this day. My parents and I never spoke of the duck story again, but it has become an ongoing joke between my brother and I. If families can have catchphrases, it would be a toss-up between "I have three ducks" and "what are you trying to do, get hollered at?" But the later is a story for another time.