It was forty years now, almost down the day
That your old lives were finished, were taken away
And in their place, one new life began
Not the life of a woman, nor life of a man
But the life of a family, and even this word
Can’t begin to describe something quite so absurd

Forty years is an awful long time
To be keeping this crazy assemblage in line
For all the hardships, sacrifices you’ve made
We wish somehow you could be amply repaid

So we got out our slide rules, pencils and such
To see if we could compute roughly how much
Was so justly deserved for your parenting touch

We consulted statistics, we asked all our friends
We worked our way back to the means from the ends
We read all of the books, and the almanacs too
To determine the proper amount due to you
Our computers computed, and crunched many numbers
(I hope we can trust they made no severe blunders)
It took four reams of paper, and two pots of ink
But we came to the final result, so we think:
The amount of two dollars and ninety-two cents
For each of the days being such good parents

It didn’t take much, then, to further deduce,
In the end, this adds up to five grand smacker-oose!

And this great big amount, how could we young ones hope
To raise up such a figure without dealing dope?
Or selling our kidneys, or some other thing
That no parent would want to discover missing.

We were racking our brains, we were renting our clothes
But the way to come up with this money, who knows?
It seems too big a figure, and there is no way
That this debt could be something we’d ever repay.

Just when we thought there was no way under the sun,
We realized with better math, it could be done
Can’t deny it’s the truth, you can’t say that we lied
If we said it’s five hundred, ten times magnified!

(accompanying $500 and a pair of binoculars)