My Husband's On Facebook
By Richard J Parise
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Babyboomer couples venture out into the world of social networking
My name is Emma Lou Harris. I've been a member of Facebook since it first
started. I've accumulated over two hundred friends, all of them women. We've
had a grand time posting back and forth over the past few years. Back in the
day, they used to call this gossiping. Had kind of a bad connotation. Facebook
changed all that. Made it acceptable. We were having a ball. Then it happened.
Don't ask me why. Don't ask me how…My husband joined Facebook! What
were the chances? I'd say about the same as Moses parting the Red
Sea, or Captain Kangaroo being demoted to private. I can still hear Fred
now, "Facebook’s stupid." "That's an invasion of privacy!" "Stop wasting your
time." And yet here he is, in all his masculine glory. And guess who received his
first friend request?...
Well I was going to say, “Over my dead body!" but with my luck I'd walk out the
front door and get hit by a bus. That’s all I'd need. Then my widower husband
would probably jump onto my Facebook page, check out my two hundred plus
friends and start speed dating...
So I friend my husband, Fred. First thing he does is start sending friend
requests to a bunch of my friends. Then he goes to “Find Friends” and starts
looking for all his old high school buddies. These are the same guys I stole him
away from when we got married twenty years ago. Like I want them back in our
lives. All they ever did with Fred was bar hop. Most of them are still single and
sitting on the same bar stool. Unless I do something quick, people are going to
mistake my husband’s Facebook page for Hooters.com…
I found out from a friend of my friend Gloria’s husband that Fred was talked
into joining Facebook by Charlie Daniels. No, not the fiddle player. I wish. He’s
the former Theresa Pope’s husband. Theresa Pope and I went to grade school
together. All the boys used to flash her the sign of the cross every time she
walked by. Thought they were being funny. Problem was, little Theresa was no
saint. She’d respond by either flashing them the bird or shooting them a half
moon that would make a hillbilly blush…
Getting back to her husband Charlie, he sent me a friend request about two
months ago. Now I hadn’t heard from Theresa since grade school and didn’t
make the connection. Seems Charlie found me on his “People You May Know”
list and randomly clicked on my name. When I saw that a Charlie Daniels
wanted to be my friend, all I could think of was that someone from my past was
somehow connected to this famous fiddler. And now he wanted to friend none
other than yours truly. Talk about let downs. Did you ever go to a corn roast in
the pouring rain or turn on the final episode of Cheers and have your cable go
out?…
I really don’t know what to post now that my husband’s one of the girls. I can
just imagine the comments he’ll come up with. It’s like my life is all a twitter.
Hey, maybe that’s the answer. Let’s see, I move over to Twitter, take all my
friends with me and tweet, tweet, tweet like a happy little Robin. Fred will never
find me. That poor man wouldn’t know the difference between a tweet and a
twerp… or, should one of my Facebook friends just happen to be an alien, you
could do me a big favor and go to Roswell.com, click on your planet, go to free
stuff, and click on alien abduction kit. I’ll pay the postage…
On second thought, I think I’ll just out last him. He seldom finishes anything
he starts. He’ll probably drop Facebook inside of a month. Like the deck he
was going to build to replace the steps on the front of the house. Five years
ago he wrote down all the measurements, went to Home Depot, bought all the
wood, piled it up in the garage and to this very day, I’m still stepping down on
cement…
