of 11 year olds an assignment: To get their parent to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it. The next day the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.Ashley said, ‘My father’s a farmer and we have a lot of egg-laying hens. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the car when we hit a big bump in the road and all the eggs got broken.’‘What’s the morale of that story?’ asked the teacher.‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!’‘Very good,’ said the teacher.Next little Sarah raised her hand and said, ‘Our family are farmers too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. One day we had a dozen eggs, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks, and the moral to this story is, ‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched’.’
‘That was a fine story Sarah.’Johnny, do you have a story to share?’‘Yes. My daddy told me this story about my Auntie Barbara. Auntie Barbara was a flight engineer on a plane in the Gulf War and her plane got hit.She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whisky, a machine gun and a machete.She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn’t break and then she landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops.She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until sheran out of bullets.Then she killed twenty more with the machete until the blade broke.And then she killed the last ten with her bare hands.’‘Good heavens,’ said the horrified teacher, ‘what kind of moral did your daddy tell you from that horrible story?’‘Stay the fuck away from Auntie Barbara when she’s had a Drink