I AM THE DECIDER!

I have been laughing ever since I saw the picture of President Bush in the newspaper with the quote "I am the Decider!" over it. That just struck my funny bone, and I do believe that particular line will live in -- well, if not in infamy, at least in today's equivalent of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations."

But his statement struck a chord in my aging psyche, too, and I had to do some thinking as to why. This morning it finally hit me as to why it vibrated so: I also am the Decider. (Move over, Dubya!).

I am the Decider of what to have for dinner.

Now this is no small decision. I have been responsible for putting dinner on the table for family for a little over 50 years now -- 53 years and almost 4 months, to be more precise, but for the sake of lower math, we'll round it off to 50 years. That is 18,250 dinners, which of course equates to 2,600 weeks of doing the grocery shopping for those dinners. If that doesn't qualify as a Decider, I don't know what does.

I am not going to deduct the vacation time I haven't had to cook, or the time between marriages (when I still had kids to cook for) or the nights we ate out. Those absences from the dinner line have been more than made up for by packed school lunches, decisions on what restaurants to go to, etc. I think I was responsible for at least 18,250 dinners.

Lucky Dubya! He's on the home stretch. Maybe when he is out of office he'll be the Decider of which bulls to castrate or which pigs to roast and that will satisfy his desire for deciding and we won't have to put up with it any more.

Depending on Jerry's genes (they are duking it out as I speak, as to whether his dad's strain of younger dying or his mom's of older dying will win), I probably will have another several years to be the Decider. Come to think of it, if he goes first, I will still have to decide what to fix for dinner, except once he is gone there will be no dinners per se; I will simply graze my way into the big pasture in the sky.

There is nothing as tiresome as figuring out what to fix TONIGHT! It is a never-ending proposition. My mother always said there is nothing sure but death and taxes. She added washing dishes as her contribution to that little statement. My contribution will be "planning dinner."

But at any rate, I thought you all should know that there are now two of us who are going on record as saying, "I am the Decider." I hope I don't sound as foolish as Dubya does.