Wish I’d Said that

I read this piece in the Readers Digest, a few years back and i like it so much i copied it onto my scrap book. (yes i kept a scrap book.) and today as i was going through it i saw the piece so im posting it.

For most of us life is less than dramatic than the movies. Few of us will get to deliver the really cool lines, like “Charge!” or “Sponge, Clamp, Suture” or “I’d like to thank the Academy” I suppose that most people at some point have imagined them selves saying “take her down to periscope depth” or even, “fire Torpedo tube number 1”

When I was on jury duty recently, I got to say something I never thought possible. The judge was asking us about our suitability to serve, not wanting to share the particulars of one of my answers; I meekly stuck my hand into the air and asked, “Your Honor, may I approach the bench?” “Approach” he said. I approached feeling puffed up and important.

The next day I recounted my thrill to a friend Geoff, who happened to have served with US Special Forces in Vietnam. He shared my excitement, “its like the first time I got to say ‘Cover Me’”. This put my rhetorical moment in perspective.

Along the years, however I did get to utter a few other big lines. I’ve said, on my knees “Will you marry me?” A few years later I said until I was hoarse, “It’s a girl!” I’ve said, from the top of a ship’s mast after crossing an ocean “Land Ho!” Melodramatic, I admit, but it sounded better than “Yo Spain!”

A friend of mine tells me a story about a magistrate in Scotland. When the town drunk was hauled in before him for the umpteenth time, the magistrate looked down at him and said, “It’s the sentence of the court that you be taken from here to the place of execution and there hanged by the neck until you are dead”

The drunk fainted. As they were reviving him, the bailiff looked up quizzically at the judge, the judge shrugged and said, “I’ve just always wanted to say that.”

I know exactly how he felt.

Christopher Buckley

6 comments:

--xh-- said...

ha ha ha.. in this same lines, read a fwd mail abt a softwere engg who wanted to just howl once... :-)

Sahefa said...

Great blog you got here.

Unknown said...

How many lines have I memorized, just to use them at the apt moment in life. But in reality - mostly it feels like am stupid... :)

vagabond dreamer said...

@ XH thanx bro id like to read that forward

@safeha Thanx

@ phoenix i knw how u feel life is just like that.

Anonymous said...

hehehhe! i loved the last part!!!!!! totally@!

i want to say "yes" to that qs [ u can guess which] all filmy isshhtyle!

freaking buts always gettin me :-/ ;)

nomad said...

@ veens i understand totally