My nine-year-old gets up to stuff. He told the funniest joke I ever heard, at the dinner table the other night.

That wasn’t it. The joke, I mean. We’ve been reading Aesop’s Fables fairly regularly. I see the format has sunk in. I thought you might be hard up for a Valentine Card at the last minute, so you can print it out and give it to your beloved. It’s not really a Valentine’s Card, but you can’t afford to be fussy at this late date.

My son sneaks into my office when I’m working in the shop, and he uses the Photodraw utility. He doesn’t have it on his computer. He only has Paint, so Photodraw is like access to a supercomputer to him. But then again, Da Vinci smeared paint on a board with a paint brush made from squirrel-hair. You wanna know why the Mona Lisa is smiling?  She knows the most famous painting in the world is being executed using roadkill, so she couldn’t help smiling quietly to herself. Road kill on a stick isn’t exactly high tech. But then again, very few people are truly limited by their tools. They just find it convenient to blame them.

Oh yes; the joke. I used to think the funniest joke ever was:

Q: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
A: I don’t know. Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
Q; Because it was dead.

That was even funnier than telling people about your dog that has no nose. But it’s not the funniest joke ever — not any more it isn’t. My son absolutely eclipsed the old one. Put it in the shade, as they say. Killed it.

Would you like me to tell it to you? I will, if you want me to. Give me some sort of sign here.

OK. Here goes:

We were eating dinner together. My wife says, “Hey, the Pope quit.” My older son says, “Being the Pope must make it hard to get a job doing anything else after you quit. I mean, what exactly does a Pope know how to do?” And then the little feller said, “Maybe he could get a job as a window washer.”

There was a pause. Maybe five or ten seconds by the clock. Then he held up his little hand, and waved it gently back and forth.

We’ll get the food off the walls in there eventually.

Nota Bene: Never fear, Sippican Cottage readers; I’ll beat that little turd like an orphan in a Dickens novel over his spelling mistakes.