Net Worth

I was talking to my wife a while back, long before I 
became her former husband, and I remember vividly, 
it seems like only yesterday but was actually about a 
third of the span of my life so far, or more precisely 
five-thirteenths which is even more than a third if you
think about it.  Anyway, we were in the kitchen, and I 
don’t remember what I added in, how I put it all together, 
but I simply had to tell her the news, so I went to meet 
her in the kitchen, which you had to pass through to get 
from the rest of the house to the TV room that the previous 
owners, without the proper permits, had added on to the 
back of the house and which was big, the TV room not  
the house, and doubled as a dining room and tripled, 
already I suppose, as a nursery, so we frequently ran 
into each other there, the kitchen not the TV room.  
Now something tells me it wasn’t in that kitchen but 
in the other one where we put in a small TV and often 
sat around but somehow my memory takes me back 
to the earlier one where there wasn’t room enough for 
more than two adult persons let alone a table.  Anyway, 
I went into the kitchen and waited for her, leaning against 
the sink.  I was deep in thought.  I didn’t even notice the 
dishes in the sink although I guess I had to have—funny 
the things you remember.  Anyway, I got thirsty standing 
around there but I didn’t want to go into the living room 
to get a drink from the liquor cabinet because I was afraid 
I’d miss her, and anyway I didn’t drink back then, so I 
made myself a glass of chocolate milk.  At last, she came 
by and asked me what I was doing standing around there, 
well I would think it was obvious, but she said it so 
tunefully I actually forgot for a moment that I had just 
figured out that we were just shy, this close, to being 
millionaires and believe it or not that we would become 
very unhappy for a very long time before becoming 
friends again.

Fredric Stevens Jacobs is an impecunious adjunct in the English Department at St. John’s University, Queens NY.  The author of numerous poems, stories and essays, he has rarely been published, most recently (and not very) by English Journal and Academic Questions, and in fact has no middle name.

A Song for Fredric