It’s the Pitts: Miss Understanding

Men can be such wimps. 

I have come to the conclusion, after the death of their elderly spouse, women seem to have far less trouble than men who lose their spouse. Men just can’t seem to live without a woman in their life, but women seem to flourish without a man in theirs. 

This became obvious to me after seeing four blue-haired widows getting smashed on wine margaritas at Olive Garden, laughing and having such a good time, the manager had to come by and ask them to tone it down.

A couple years ago, I had a rancher friend who had the misfortune of losing his dog and his wife in a span of six weeks. He completely fell apart and went to seed. 

His once obese body was now skin and bones because he didn’t know how to boil water, and his clothes wouldn’t even make good shop rags they were so far gone. My friend didn’t know how to wash and dry clothes. He just wore them until they fell apart, and then he’d go to the hardware store and buy new ones.

It was like he was having a mid-life crisis at age 75. The only thing he had going for him was he had inherited what was once a huge Mexican land grant some distant relative had finagled the Mexican government out of.

I felt sorry for my friend, and I tried to help him, advising him he would be far better off just getting a new one right away.

Shortly after his wife died, I was surprised to hear he was a regular on the dating scene.

“What the heck are you doing?” I asked. “Don’t you think you should show some respect to your widow who stuck by you through thick and thin and was married to you for over 50 years? You should have waited at least a year.”

Dutch researchers have found men have, on average, four billion more brain cells than women, but I think they lose them all after their spouse dies. 

My buddy got so desperate, he tried finding a mate on the internet but found no takers. Then, he tried a more traditional approach by advertising in the weekly newspaper’s classified ads, but he came off as sounding a bit too desperate. 

His ad read, “Elderly rich guy in poor health looking for a new wife to cook and do laundry. PLEASE Dear God!”

When this didn’t work he resorted to the old tried-and-true method of becoming part of the local bar scene seven nights per week. 

It wasn’t too long before he had a new girlfriend who rode a Harley Davidson, chewed tobacco, hogged the remote control and had already been married four times. It was a total and complete trash landing. 

His new girlfriend had spiked green and orange hair, was hopeless in the kitchen, got drunk and liked to go dancing every night. In other words, she was the poster child for birth control. 

My buddy’s new main squeeze looked a little rough around the edges to me, but my friend defended her and said she didn’t look all that bad after nine or 10 drinks. 

Then my friend and his girlfriend went off to Las Vegas, and she got him hogtied for good all legal like. 

Before too long, my buddy started seeing the error of his ways. His new wife didn’t shave her legs or under her arms, snored so loud it registered on seismographs three counties away and she had a weird fixation with firearms which made him a little nervous as two of her previous husbands had died under suspicious circumstances.

When my friend informed me he was getting remarried just five months after the death of his first wife, I blew a gasket. 

“Are you crazy?” I asked

He countered, “You’re the one who told me after the death of a loved one you should get another one right away to replace the one you lost.”

I replied, “I was talking about getting a new dog, not a new wife you imbecile.”