It seems fitting that the road on the journey to nowhere should be riddled with potholes. Here are a few that I bounced over during the last few weeks. I’m guessing that you’ve hit a couple of these yourself!
- We were getting ready to leave the pool and Sally handed me my t-shirt. I put it on backwards.
- We changed pharmacies when we moved, but I keep saying ‘CVS’ instead of ‘RiteAid.’
- Sally wanted to attend a ZOOM event that she thought began at 7. I said it was from 5-7 and that she had missed it. It turns out I confused the time of her event with another activity. She was right, but because she listened to me, she missed it.
- I was talking with my sister and mentioned that I had attended Bertie’s book club earlier in the day. Startled, she asked, “What???” I repeated that I attended Bertie’s book club. It wasn’t until she asked me a third time that I realized what I was saying. Bertie was my first wife. It was Sally’s book club I had attended. It happened again a week later when I told the pharmacist I was picking up a prescription for my wife. He asked me her name and I said “Roberta Crane.” I was aware of the error even as I was saying it.
- In the morning, I start the coffee, take our mugs out of the dishwasher and put the rest of the dishes away. One day I was running late, so I took the mugs out with the intention of emptying the dishwasher after we had had our coffee. You guessed it: I never unloaded the dishwasher.
- Why do I make so many mistakes brewing coffee in the morning??? After starting the coffee maker, I retrieve the half-and-half from the refrigerator, measure it into our mugs and then warm it for 30 seconds in the microwave. On Wednesday, though, when I went to the refrigerator, I couldn’t find it. I searched a second time. Then I asked Sally if she had finished it when she made her second cup the day before. She hadn’t. I went back into the kitchen and immediately saw it sitting on the counter. Apparently, I had taken it out of the refrigerator at the beginning of my coffee-making routine instead of at the end…and totally forgotten I had done so in the interim.
- This one happens a lot: I ask Sally about something and she’ll say, “Don’t you remember when we…” and then I immediately remember it. It seems my recognition works but my recall memory shorts out on a regular basis.
Thankfully, my life isn’t all potholes. Sometimes it’s more like cruising on an open highway. Sometimes there are bursts of creativity. Sometimes it’s a matter of deep concentration on a task and doing it correctly. Sometimes it’s just figuring stuff out. To whit:
- I ordered a 71″x74″ shower curtain printed with the image of Renoir’s ‘Dance at Bougival.’ Neither Sallly nor I liked it in the bathroom…but we both love the image. Two days later, it occurred to me that it might work over the couch in the living room where we have a twenty-foot ceiling. Wow…just stunning…thereby confirming the old saw that there’s a fine line between creativity and insanity!
- When we moved, we made the decision to keep our LPs and 45s and try to hook up the old turntable I’d been carting around since the 70s. Getting it to work set off a furious flurry of overnight orders from Amazon: amplifier, pre-amp, speakers, speaker wire, adapters, and more adapters. But that was only the beginning. Then came the task of connecting all our electronics: smart tv, amp, turntable, dvd player and dual headphones. It generated a rat’s nest of tangled wires, but everything works. As I write this, I’m still waiting for delivery of a pair of bluetooth speakers.
- Once I had the electronics figured out, we needed a tv stand to house everything. Sally ordered one from Amazon and it fell to me to assemble it. I approached the task with great trepidation as I have never been able to make sense of do-it-yourself assembly instructions, no matter how well written and illustrated. I invariably put something in backwards or upside down, or use the wrong size screws. But this time was different. Everything I saw before me made sense and I had every confidence in what I was doing as I worked slowly and double-checked the diagram before proceeding to the next step. Two and a half hours later and voila: picture perfect assembly on the first try!
And so the journey continues…
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Mistakes on the Journey to Nowhere 