Near Miss, I Guess

A couple of Tuesday mornings ago my wife and I were in the ferry line.

She had brought the then current issue of The New Yorker.

She handed it over to me saying "why don't you come up with a punch line for this cartoon".

It was the weekly cartoon contest where the magazine publishes a cartoon with no caption and invites the readers to submit their ideas for the punch line.

I have thought about it superficially a couple of times but have never come up with anything.

On that Tuesday, in the midst of the grinding boredom of waiting for that always late ferry I had plenty of time and nothing obvious to do with it.

So I applied myself.

And I came up with an idea.

I took my pen from the console box and wrote it in beneath the cartoon.

And I showed it to my wife,

After staring at it a moment she said "I think we should send it".

I thought so too.

We were pretty excited until she remembered that the cut off was the previous Sunday.

So we continued a lively conversation to cover up the grinding boredom of waiting for a ferry, and forgot all about that contest and my  too late for the contest contribution.

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Today my wife showed me the three finalists for that cartoon.