Nifty Fifty

Tizzy's blogfest is to celebrate reaching 50 followers on her Impossible Dreams blog.  The idea is to create something with 50 as the theme.  My entry is a short little story.  After you've read mine make sure you go to Tizzy's site to find the other entries and read them as well.



                                          The Big Five O

         Maybe she had listened one too many times to Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover".  Or maybe she had realized that she was still a relatively young hot babe and I had just turned fifty.

          Sure, back when we had gotten married everyone was telling me I was making a mistake.  Some suggested I was using 50% of my brain in thinking out this marriage thing--maybe I wasn't thinking with my brain at all.  Now I had gained fifty pounds and she had gained some devious knowledge of how to separate me from nearly everything I owned.

           So on my fiftieth birthday I was handed divorce papers drawn up by the $99 paralegal who was offering a $50 special.  Oh yeah, they all thought it was fair and equitable.  It was a fifty-fifty split--she got the assets and I got the debt.

           At least I got the pick-up truck--a 1988 Ford F-150 that had seen better days.  It had sat in the back yard barely used anymore, but it still ran.  I won't say it that the truck was not very dependable, but I wouldn't have wanted to go more than fifty miles from home in it.  It was not very economical to drive either.  I guess it got fifty gallons per mile.  Okay, I exaggerate, but I never left a gas station without having to pay at least fifty dollars.
  
            Believe me, I was not thrilled when I got the notice from the DMV that the registration renewal was due and I would have to get the truck smog checked.  They gave me sixty days, but of course I procrastinated until fifty days had passed and I decided that I'd better get it done so I wouldn't have to pay the fifty dollar penalty

            At the smog check station I was nervous that the truck might not pass the inspection and would require major repairs.  If that were the case I would have been just as well to roll the truck off a fifty foot cliff and forget about it.   But to my relief the truck passed.  I handed the smog inspection guy a fifty dollar bill and he handed me a penny.  My next stop would be the DMV.

           Going to the DMV would be high on my list of the top fifty places I hate to go.  I usually end up waiting at least fifty minutes whenever I have to go there.  When I arrived, there were maybe fifty people waiting to take a number.   I looked up at the digital counter to see which number was being served and noted that it read 750.

            From past experience I was aware that there was a number cycle that ended at 999 and then started over at one.   Since I estimated that there had been about fifty people ahead of me to pick up a number and from the looks of the waiting area there were maybe another fifty or so already there, I would probably be getting a number somewhere around 850.  That meant that this was going to take much longer than fifty minutes today.

           I could only hope that my estimation was wrong.  Please let my number be less than 850, I thought to myself.  When I reached the number dispenser I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and then took a number.  I opened my eyes and looked at the ticket in my hand--50.

                                            50 *  50 *  50 *  50 *  50 *  50

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