My cousin

You heard about people so dumb, they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?

I had a cousin like that. She started out OK, but after they finally kicked her out of primary school (after repeating second grade three times and third grade five times) she spent her days watching daytime talk shows, and gradually got dumber and dumber until she couldn’t even walk and breathe at the same time.

Despite her handicap, she loved taking long walks in the park in the afternoon. Her mother taught her a safe route through the park, with benches about every hundred yards or so; she would walk to a bench, sit down for a breather (literally!), then get up and stroll to the next bench, and so forth.

She died tragically a few years back. The big storm of ’98 did her in. On her daily stroll the next morning, she walked around the bend between the twenty-second and twenty-third bench, only to find that the latter had been removed – taken in for repairs after being smashed by a fallen tree, as we found out later. She was found sprawled on the path, passed out and blue in the face, only fifteen yards from the twenty-fourth bench.