pstaged Again

ome time ago Baron Von Lodge was the head of a small country near Switzerland known as Lilliland.

The Baron and Lady Angela of Alpine Castle, his fiancée, would hold meetings to discuss whatever was important to them and would like to discuss. One subject that came up many times was successful relationships between men and women. Professor Hamblin, the Baron’s chief advisor, conducted these meetings and gave his insight as needed.

Professor Hamblin was relating a story about a successfully married couple named William and Mary. They always seemed to be the model of happily married life, but as of late, a new dimension to their relationship was added.

William and Mary were well to do financially, and did not really need anything. But William decided to have a garden planted on the estate where they lived. It was to be a medium-sized garden, just large enough for one person to manage. William built a small one-room potting shed with one comfortable chair that could not be seen from the main house. He said that he would like to sit there and rest while he was gardening or read some gardening books. There was only the one chair in the shed and if someone wanted to visit him there, they would have to sit on a pile of topsoil.

A close friend asked William why the sudden interest in gardening? William said that he didn’t particularly care if nothing but weeds came up. He just wanted to pretend at gardening because his wife, Mary, seemed to always want to upstage him at everything. He would start to tell his friends a story and Mary would either finish the story, or offer a better story, or something to make him feel like a fool in front of his friends. So he said that he began the garden to get out of the house for a while on the pretense of gardening.

One day William looked at his garden and things started to bloom everywhere. At first, he thought that they were just weeds. He asked himself what was in that bag of seeds he bought and planted anyway? He looked around for the bag that he threw in the corner of the shed several weeks earlier and found it. It said “Tomatoes.” And to his amazement that was what was coming up – tomato bushes with large tomatoes growing on every vine. Well, what do you know? There must be something to this gardening anyway.

Mary stopped upstaging William with his stories and let him have his say, otherwise, she could be upstaged by some tomato bushes.