One of my fourth graders asked my teacher’s assistant, “How old are you, Mrs. Glass?”
“You should never ask an adult’s age,” I broke in.
“That’s okay,” Harriett said and smiled. “I’m fifty.”
“Wow, you don’t look that old,” the boy said. I was breathing a sigh of relief when another child chimed in, “Parts of her do.”
Teacher: “Colin, can you tell me which month is the shortest?”
Colin: “It’s May, Miss Johnson.”
Teacher: “No, it isn’t. The shortest month is February.”
Colin: “But, Miss Johnson, February has eight letters in it, while May has only three!”
“Mommy, Mommy, where are you?” cried the little boy standing outside a store in the shopping mall.
“You poor little boy,” said the elderly lady sitting on the bench in the mall. “Come with me, and I will get you ice cream, and then we will go look for your mother.”
“I know where your mother is,” said a small little girl.
“Quiet!” whispered the little boy. “I know where she is, too, but I managed to get two free ice cream cones this morning, and I want a third one!”
A small farm boy was milking his cow when all of a sudden a bull came charging toward him. As horrified workers nearby watched, the boy calmly continued his milking.
To everyone’s astonishment, the bull stopped a few inches away from the boy, turned around, and walked away. “Weren’t you afraid?” one of the workers asked the little boy.
“Not at all,” the little boy replied. “I knew this cow was his mother-in-law.”
Out bicycling one day with my eight-year-old granddaughter, Carolyn, I got a little wistful. “In ten years,” I said, “you’ll want to be with your friends, and you won’t go walking, biking, and swimming with me like you do now.”
Carolyn shrugged. “In ten years, you’ll be too old to do all those things anyway.”
Residents of a local nursing home loved the karate school’s demonstration. They could tell because they gave us a big hand at the end. After the applause died down, everyone remained seated, so we showed off a few more moves. When our encore ended and again no one budged, we launched into our second encore.
“I didn’t expect karate to be so popular here,” I whispered to one resident.
“It’s not,” she said with a kindly smile. “We’re waiting for you to leave so we can get on with our bingo game.”
