Overheard in JC Penney

For obvious reasons, I only tour the lingerie sections of department stores once a year. This is it: Christmas shopping time. The other twelve months of the year find me avoiding the unmentionables department like Artie Lange avoids salad bars. But today found us in JC Penney at the tony Christiana Mall in swanky Delaware (drive 60 miles, pay no sales tax! except for about a hundred dollars in tolls on I-95).

Listen, I'm not exactly Hugh Hefner, and what I was buying Peggy is hardly the satin-and-lace sorta thing. But I stood there, politely awaiting my turn, examining the signs and posters all around me (I found "the Ultimate Push-Up" interesting; apparently, it had nothing to do with the strength training exercise performed in a prone position, lying horizontal and face down, raising and lowering the body using the arms.)

But as I stood there, wondering what models who pose for these posters think about while the camera whirs and snaps, I started listening in on a conversation between the sales lady and a customer ahead of me.

The sales lady, in the same opprobrious tone she might have used to say, "Well, he showed up drunk at three AM and was doing it with his girlfriend right on the living room floor when the kids came down for breakfast in the morning", actually said, "He bought his wife a carpet steamer for Christmas."

Dead silence. Stunned looks all around. Eyes a-rolling, heads a-shakin', the ladies on both sides of the cash register mourned for the dignity of their slighted sister. At long last, one of them spoke up and said, "The really horrible thing is that she already HAS a carpet steamer, and he DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT!"

I feel sorry for this dude, whoever he is and however abysmal his misery. Had he been fortunate enough to know my dad, he would have learned the two vital lessons that Dad taught me that have saved my bacon a hundred times (and I am swiftly running out of places to store all that saved bacon):

1 - They can't make you do it, but they can make you wish you had. (Actually, this had nothing to do with marriage or male-female stuff at all, but, rather, was a gem learned from some guy whom Dad knew in the Navy, who really wished later that he had done as asked earlier.

1b - apropos of nothing, Dad also told me "the first time you will feel old will be the first time a police officer calls you "Sir." True! I was 35, and it still stings.

2 - (Here's the Advice For the Married Man) - Don't give her a gift that has an electric cord.

This advice is in effect until someone invents an electric diary.