"Mother, may I...."

I was sitting on the deck with Bern, just now, in the Adirondack chairs she made years ago with Hank Fotter, I'd finished my book and she was reading hers.

(One of the keys of a successful marriage, it seems to me, is 'marry another reader'. We spend hours each week together, both reading. You might, from time to time, tell the other what just happened in your book. But mostly not. But just that, being together reading, without conversation, teaches you that you don't have to talk to 'be together', a valuable lesson for a couple.)

Anyway, I asked her, "May I have that ashtray," since I was smoking and she wouldn't.

And then, the way the cracks in my mind work, I fell into a crack to my early years and a game called, "Mother, may I...."

That's all I remembered. Nothing else. Anyone out there who knows about the "Mother, may I" game?

Email me at Padrejgb@aol.com, if you do. Thanks.

"Mother, may I ask them to do that?"