Book : The Egg And I - MacDonald, Betty

-Titulo Original : The Egg And I

-Fabricante :

Harper Perennial

-Descripcion Original:

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Egg and IBy Betty MacDonaldHarper PaperbacksCopyright © 1987 Betty MacDonaldAll right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-06-091428-8Chapter One And Ill Be Happy Along with teaching us that lamb must be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wifes bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work. First make sure that your husband is doing the kind of work he enjoys and is best fitted for and then cheerfully accept whatever it entails. If you marry a doctor, dont whine because he doesnt keep the hours of a shoe clerk, and by the same token if you marry a shoe clerk, dont complain because he doesnt make as much money as a doctor. Be satisfied that he works regular hours, Mother told us. According to Mother, if your husband wants to give up the banking business and polish agates for a living, let him. Help him with his agate polishing. Learn to know and to love agates (and incidentally to eat them). It is depressing enough for a man to know that he has to work the rest of his life without the added burden of knowing that it will be work he hates. Too many potentially great men are eating their hearts out in dull jobs because of selfish wives. And Mother had examples too. There was the Fuller Brush man who came to our house once a month and told Mother how deliriously happy he used to be raising Siberian wolves and playing the violin with a symphony orchestra until he ran afoul of and married Myrtle. The man in the A & P vegetable department who was lilting through life as a veterinary surgeon until he married a woman who hated animals but loved vegetables. And the numerous mining men Mother and Daddy knew who were held down to uninspiring company jobs by wives who wouldnt face the financial insecurity of their husbands going into business for themselves. Boy, we said, when we get married, our husbands will do exactly as they please, and they have. This Ill-go-where-you-go-do-what-you-do-be-what-you-are-and-Ill-be-happy philosophy worked out splendidly for Mother for she followed my mining engineer father all over the United States and led a fascinating life; but not so well for me, because although I did what she told me and let Bob choose the work in which he felt he would be happiest and then plunged wholeheartedly in with him, I wound up on the Pacific Coast in the most untamed corner of the United States, with a ten-gallon keg of good whiskey, some very dirty Indians, and hundreds and hundreds of most uninteresting chickens. Something was wrong. Either Mother skipped a chapter or there was some great lack in me, because Bob was happy in his work but I was not. I couldnt learn to love or to know chickens or Indians and, instead of enjoying living in that vast wilderness, I kept thinking: Who am I against two and a half million acres of mountains and trees? Perhaps Mother with her flair for pioneering would have enjoyed it. Perhaps. Where Mother got this pioneer spirit, how she came by it, I do not know, for a thorough search of the family records reveals no Daniel Boones, no wagon trains heading West with brave women slapping at Indians with their sunbonnets. In fact, our family tree appears rife with lethargy, which no doubt accounts for our all living to be eighty-seven or ninety-three. Mothers ancestors were Dutch. Ten Eyck was their name and they settled in New York in 1613. One of my fathers family names was Campbell. The Campbells came to Virginia from Scotland. They were all nice well-bred people but not daring or adventuresome except for Gammy, my fathers mother, who wore her corsets upside down and her shoes on the wrong feet and married a gambler with yellow eyes. The gambler, James Bard of Bardstown, Kentucky, took his wife out West, played Faro with his money, his wifes money and even some of his companys money and then tactfully disappeared and