Story hook

I'm not one for giving marital advice, but I’d love to be able to share this story with you. As a new bride, my Aunt Rita moved into the small home her husband owned. She put a shoe box on a shelf in her closet and asked her husband never to touch it. For sixty years Uncle Rodney left the box alone until Aunt Rita was old and dying. One say when he was putting her affairs in order, he found the box again and thought it might hold something important. Opening it, he found a woolly hat and £140,000 in cash. He took the box to her and asked about the contents. ‘My mother gave me that box the day we married,’ she explained. ‘She told me to knit a woolly hat to help ease my frustrations every time I got mad at you.’ Uncle Rodney was very touched that in sixty years she’d only been mad at him once. ‘What's the £140,000 for?’ he asked. ‘Oh, that’s the money I made selling the rest of the hats.’

I was recently told about a couple, 90 years old, who had been married for seventy years. Though they were far from rich, they managed to get by because they watched their pennies. They were both in good health, largely due to the wife’s insistence on healthy foods and exercise. One day, their good health didn’t help when their house caught fire while they were sleeping, sending them off to heaven. They reached the pearly gates, and St. Peter escorted them inside. He took them to a beautiful mansion, furnished in gold and fine silks, with a fully stocked kitchen with every imaginable cuisine laid out before them. Next to the house was a championship golf course, finer and more beautiful than any ever built on earth. The old man asked St. Peter how much all this was going to cost. ‘Why, nothing,’ Peter replied, ‘remember, this is your reward in Heaven.’ The old man glared at his wife and said, ‘You and your stupid bran muffins. We could have been here twenty years ago!’