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There is something about the refrigerator that renders me helpless. I am suddenly incapable of moving a jar of pickles to see what is behind it. I lose the ability to turn my head sideways, which might enable me to see the items I am looking for, standing tall in the refrigerator door. Sometimes even the shelves directly in front of me are a bit of blur. Within several seconds of opening the refrigerator, I must call to my wife for help.
"Oh please help me," I cry. "I am bewildered and confused." I do not know what the solution to this problem is, or even if there is a solution. When I was single the refrigerator contained three things -- Ding Dongs, beer, and an orange. Such simplicity is no longer an option. I did feel much better about not being able to find things in the refrigerator when I discovered that my wife has the same sort of tunnel vision helplessness when dealing with paint cans. "Where is the can of green paint?" she asked me as we were working in the garage. It was right in front of her. The can was green. There was green paint dribbling down the side of it. The label said, "green paint." I didn’t point out any of these things because I knew how my wife felt. If it had been a stalk of celery, I would have been unable to find it. Finding stuff is difficult. Before we leave for any event that requires us to arrive at a specified time, my wife and I like to play this little game that involves ripping the house apart looking for missing items. Wallets, keys, and my glasses are perfect objects to search for in this game. We usually remember putting them in a place where we were certain we would remember we put them. (By the way, some good places to check for lost keys are in the door, in the laundry, in your German Shepherd's mouth, and in Michigan.) To maintain domestic tranquillity, my wife and I take turns on who loses things. My favorite instance was when we were moving from one apartment to another, back in what we refer to as our "traveling gypsy" days. Everything in the apartment was in boxes. We were about to leave when I realized that I didn’t know where my glasses were. They weren’t sitting on top of any boxes, and that’s pretty much all there was left. We checked the ground outside in case I had dropped them. We checked the car and the truck. Then we began unpacking boxes, thinking that maybe I had mistakenly packed my glasses. Forty-five minutes later, in hopes that the glasses would magically appear, we had gotten to the point where we were checking places that we had already checked twice before. I was looking inside the toilet tank when my wife called me from the other room. "Honey," she said. There was an odd tone in her voice. "Yes?" "Remember earlier when you were looking in the refrigerator..." Sure enough, I had left my glasses in the refrigerator. Maybe I subconsciously thought they would be helpful when I was looking for stuff there. Who knows? As we were getting ready to leave for the new apartment, my wife started to drive off in the car and I had to flag her down from the window of the truck. When I had put my glasses on, they had fogged over. They were still ice cold. After the mist cleared from my lenses, we hit the road. Halfway out of the parking lot, I pulled up alongside my wife. "Do you remember how to get there?" I asked. "I’m sure we’ll find it," she said, "eventually." |
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