King Size Family

As an English teacher at the
Turkish American Association
Here in Adana, Turkey,
I was asking the students
How many brothers
And sisters they each had.
Most students had two or three
Siblings to contend with,
But one student announced
That he had 27 brothers,
Five sisters and three mothers!
In the Eastern part of Turkey,
Men can have up to four wives,
And families frequently are very large.
I asked him if he knew
All of their names,
And the way he hesitated to answer,
It was obvious that
He wasn’t sure that he did!
With thirty-three children
They probably celebrated
A birthday almost every other week
If they could remember them all.
I wonder how many bathrooms
They had in their house!
For that matter,
I wonder how many bedrooms they had.
I have no idea how his father
Could support them all.
Having sired that many children,
He probably didn’t have
Much time left for working.
I am just trying to imagine
37 distinctly different personalities
Trying to live together
Under a single roof.
His father would have to be
An expert at mob psychology
To get that horde
To work together.
I think he must have had to
Referee an intra-sibling battle
A dozen times a day,
And I am sure
His wives got into a hassle
With each other
Frequently enough
To turn all of his hair grey.
When I asked the student
How many children
He would like to have.
He told me he would like to
Do what his father had done.
Now imagine if each
Of his brothers did the same,
What an extended family
They would have,
And who could possibly
Keep track of the multitude
Of nephews and nieces,
Much less remember their names
Or who they belonged to.

Sleeping on the Fringe

When we got married,
We promised each other
To split everything
Fifty – Fifty,
So when it came to sleep
I obligingly gave her
Fifty percent of the bed,
Expecting that would
Leave me with fifty percent
For myself.
What I didn’t figure
Was that she would take
The middle fifty percent,
And leave me with
A quarter on each side.
Somehow or another,
That seems to be the way
It worked out
On almost everything
We tried to share.
She always got
The middle,
And I was left
On the fringe.