Front Porch Tales by Philip Gulley

Author:Philip Gulley [Philip Gulley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061744068
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

My Cup Runneth Over, and So Does My Toilet

My sons buy me cards every year at Father’s Day. I pay for them, but it’s the thought that counts. One year, my card had a star on it. It was actually a bar mitzvah card, but my two-year-old likes stars, so that’s the card I got to open at the breakfast table.

We went over to my father’s house that afternoon. Most everyone in the family was there because in my family, if you don’t show up, you become the topic of conversation. My second cousin wasn’t there, so we talked about him. He’s a fairly young man but is retired because he’s filthy rich. We were glad he wasn’t there, since we’ve been wanting to talk about him for a long time.

None of us like him because he’s not only rich, he’s happy. We come from a long line of poor people who’ve been able to endure poverty by believing that rich people are unhappy so a person is better off poor. But my cousin has gone and shattered that myth. He is rich and happy, which makes the rest of us miserable.

We talked about his house. He is married and has no children, but his home has five bathrooms. My grandpa was betting the toilet paper bill alone would break him. I can’t imagine having five bathrooms. Our house has one and a half bathrooms, and just keeping those going can be burdensome.

Like the week after Father’s Day, when my wife walked into the bathroom and noticed the carpet was damp, and I told her not to worry because it was just humidity. But the next day, the water was squishing up in between our toes. It was less like humidity and more like an underground spring.

Then I noticed that whenever we flushed, water ran down the back of the tank. I’d never worked on toilets before, but I thought it would build my character, which is what people say when they’re too cheap to call a plumber. I worked on it for a few hours before stopping to take a nap. Which is when my wife called a plumber who came and fixed it in five minutes in exchange for the title to our house.

The only comfort I took in all of this was knowing that my cousin has five toilets to take care of, which I think is God’s way of teaching him that wealth has its disadvantages.

Wealth does have its disadvantages. Not that I would know this personally, but I suspect when you’re rich you’re always wondering why people invite you to parties. Do they like you, or do they like your money? I never wonder why people invite me to parties. It’s because they like my wife.

There’s a story in the New Testament about a rich man. One day, he asked Jesus what it took to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments, and when the rich man said he’d done that, Jesus told him to sell all he had and give the money to the poor.

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