THINGS I DON’T WANT TO DO

Everyone has a “don’t want to do list” included is having your tonsils removed.

Getting up if front of people and talking about something of which you are not sure of.

Asking your future father-in-law for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

On that subject I remember when I asked my wife to marry me, and she said yes. She then went and told her mother, who gasped and said, “But he hasn’t asked daddy.”

When I heard that, it was almost enough to make me forget the whole thing.

That wasn’t in my plans to ask daddy, but the thing I didn’t realize was that when you got married you married the whole family. Even though you might not be close after the wedding this still looms in the background. After some egging on by my wife to be, I concluded that this was the proper protocol and relented and faced the music.

This was something I did not want to do!  Her dad seemed to like me and when I finally got up enough nerve I went and asked him if it would be okay with him if we got married?  He with fear and trembling (he didn’t think I could support her for my prospects weren’t very good) said it would be alright with him.

Most of my life, “Things I didn’t want to do,” list was longer than my want to list (and still is).

I have got into some things I didn’t want to do and then had to tough it out, I will relate just one of them.

I had been working on my uncle’s farm and we had caught up so I decided to visit one of my cousins. I had no sooner got there when she asked what I was doing and I told her we were caught up for a few days on the farm. A man was standing there and she asked me if I would like to earn some money to which I said sure thinking she had some minor job that needed to be done, when she told me the man standing there needed to get his crops in and he would hire me.

The next thing I knew I was in his car heading for his place, this was not what I wanted to do but I was trapped into it. I told him I could only work for four days and he agreed to bring me back on Thursday, this being Sunday afternoon.

We arrived as his wife was setting the table and the man said; “This is my wife” whereupon I said hello. If she responded I couldn’t hear it. She put the food on the table and I was amazed at how much food she served, so many dishes and I liked it all and complemented her by eating as much as I could. As soon as she put the food on the table she left without saying anything, I later heard her and her husband say something to each other in whispered tones.

After dinner the man showed me my bedroom where I had a double bed, he then said we would rise early and get to the fields which was no problem for me as I always awake by 5 o’clock.
Early the next morning, when I got to the kitchen the wife had cooked a big breakfast and I ate all I could hold, and off we went to the fields. So far everything was great and at lunch time we arrived at the table where I saw that we had the same food we had the night before, but that was not a problem, I liked leftovers alright.

That evening after we had finished the days work the woman put the same food back on the table, left the room and we ate it again. There was a man there that was introduced to me as another worker that was going to help us, after eating I was tired and started to bed when the man said that the new worker was going to have to share my bed for they didn’t have another one.

Because I was tall I usually slept on an angle in the bed so as to have more room using most all of the bed. There wasn’t much I could say about doubling up so we went into the bedroom and got ready for bed, after I got into the bed the worker said, “I sleep in the nude.”

To me it was like a death experience where your life goes before your eyes, this was something I didn’t want to do. This stranger took off his clothes and crawled into bed and I still in a state of shocked gave him as much of the bed as possible. I slept on the left side of the bed and only used about 6 inches of it. It is amazing how little of the bed you need when faced with situation like this. The last thing I wanted to do was to touch or rub against this stranger.

I still sleep on the left side of the bed right on the edge of the bed after all these years for that night I implanted in my subconscious stay as far to the left as possible.

We went through the next day, big breakfast, same food for lunch and dinner. The third day she added a new dish along with the original food. The woman was what you might call a middling looker she wasn’t ugly and she wasn’t pretty. She was younger than the man and over the 5 days I was there she never spoke a word to me even though we were in the same room at times.

Thursday arrived and I finished the day, I had been looking forward to leaving this place and when we had eaten I said I was ready to go. He didn’t want to take me home. Without going to the long discussion about his promise to return me home he finally relented and drove me the several miles back and it was a relief to be out of there.

Looking back, that was something I didn’t want to do, but if I had a bed to myself, if the food had been new every day, if the woman had been at least social enough to say good morning or something, the hard work wouldn’t have bothered me but things were just too weird for me.

Something just wasn’t right, it was something you felt, not something you can describe.