My absent-mindedness is a handicap, not only to me, but to The Husband.
Case on point:
The Husband and I planned to swap vehicles this morning. When it came time for him to leave for work, we could not find the keys to my car, and we do not have an extra key. We spent 30 minutes tearing this house apart looking for them. He finally found them in the space between the left rear passenger door and the back seat of my car.
It is at times like these when I am glad that The Husband is a patient person. Having lived with me for 42 years, he knows these things happen from time to time. Other men might have railed at their wives this morning for not putting things back where they belong, but The Husband just patiently helped me search.
In all fairness, it wasn't entirely my fault.
You see, I generally function by being a creature of habit. Come home, dump my stuff in a chair, go potty, etc. But yesterday was an unusual day, and I did things in an unfamiliar order. Since The Boss has gone to a work-related conference this week, I took some time off from work to handle the problem of disposing of Aunt Melvie's "treasures." Tuesday, I donated a lawn bag (plus an armload) full of jigsaw puzzles to a senior center, then I rented some booth space in an antique mall, where I hope to sell the rest of the stuff for The Rest of The Aunts. In the middle of that, I stopped to pick up a grocery order. Yesterday was to be spent looking up values and pricing each item.
Around here, the problem with taking off from work is that when folks find out I'm home, they come up with things for me to do.
Between Tuesday evening and yesterday morning, Nanny asked me to drive her to a doctor appointment in Memphis (since I'm off work, you know). I could not turn her down. On the way home, both of us had some errors to run. We got home around 3 p.m. We briefly stopped by my house to pick up some lettuce I'd promised to give to Nanny. (This is when I unlocked the front door.) Before taking her home, I stopped at the end of her long driveway to hitch her garbage can to the back of my car so we could drag it home. At her house, I dumped rainwater out of the garbage can and put it where it goes, then I came back home.
I was seriously close to peeing my pants.
But before I'd picked up Nanny that morning, I'd stopped by our mailbox. It was crammed full. I took it out of the box and pitched it into the back seat of my car. While Nanny was seeing the doctor, I sorted through the mail and returned it to the back seat. It was all over the place when I got home. I gathered it up (this is where I dropped the keys to free my hands) and raced into the house to pee.
If I had not stopped to get the lettuce, this key predicament would never have happened. I'd have had all of my usual stuff in my hands when I unlocked the front door, and we could have found my keys immediately.
So it's the lettuce's fault. Or Walmart's fault for sending me so much lettuce that I needed to share it with someone to keep it from going bad.
* * * * * * * * *
I am now waiting on 10 a.m., which is the time that the antique mall opens. They are supposed to have some shelf space cleared for Melvie's stuff. Everything is priced and packed in The Husband's truck. Having gone through it all last night, I am worried that there won't be enough room for everything. Melvie collected music boxes and dolls. She must've had 20 copper music boxes shaped like trucks, helicopters, carousels, etc. She had porcelain music boxes, and musical dolls and souvenir plates. She had some creepy, sad-faced jester/clown music boxes that gyrate a little bit when the music plays. (I'd smash them with a hammer if she'd left them to me.) I did not find anything particularly valuable (though there was brief hope about a baseball card collection), but the combined value of the little stuff might be enough to help Melvie's sisters pay their electric bills.
Melvie would approve, I think.
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