The Perfect Joke
Abigail Thomas
Photo by Jennifer Waddell
Word Count 428
On my coffee table is the urn my best friend Chuck gave me for my 75th birthday. It is the color of a candied apple. The black lid has two birds perched on it. He told me the saleslady had assured him my ashes would fit nicely. We did a lot of joking about death. We discussed suicide. Had I ever thought about it? Of course, I had. In a miserable marriage, I had once dissolved half a bottle of aspirin in a glass of water and drank it. I was deaf for a week, and my face swelled up like the moon, and my voice was a high-pitched squeak like a mouse, but I didn’t die.
“What about you,” I asked.
“I’ve always fancied hacking my own head off,” he said.
“That would be hard,” I said.
“That’s the point,’ he said, “you wouldn’t want it to be easy.”
Gallows humor. Chuck was battling hepatitis C, a disease that would eventually kill him.
One morning, he drove all the way from the city to Woodstock to leave his dog with me for a day while he went on yet another round of doctor’s appointments. Pojd (which is Czech for “come”) is a redbone coonhound I got Chuck as payment for all good things and bad he has ever done. The dog nearly knocked me over.
That night, I made that chicken thigh thing we both like (although it means fending off four determined dogs), and we stayed up very late. The next day, he hung around until the afternoon. We were having a particularly nice time. Ten minutes after he left, he’s back, having forgotten something—the tickets to a game. Then he’s off again. Twenty minutes later, his car is pulling into my driveway again. What is it this time, I wonder. I open the door and am about to cry out, “What, you came back to ask me to marry you?” which I think is a good joke, but before I can say a word, he flings his arms open and says, “Marry me?”
After he found his cell phone (between the couch cushions), he got back into his car and rolled down the window, ”That was funny, the whole marry me thing, wasn’t it?” “Yes, it was.”
We are both, I think, actually happy at this moment. It is nothing more than what it is, two friends who think of the same joke at the same time, but it was comforting to know this is what we’ve always done and all we have to do,
Abigail has four children, twelve grandchildren, one great-grandchild, two dogs, and a high school education. Her books include Safekeeping; A Three Dog Life; and What Comes Next and How to Like It. Her new book, Still Life At Eighty, is out now on The Golden Notebook Press. She lives in Woodstock, NY.