I feel like I am forgetting something … Oh yeah, to write this column! Dangit!
Almost forgot.
I seem to be doing that a lot lately. Or if not a lot, at least more often. Forgetting things. Being absent-minded. Not remembering … wait … what was I doing? Dangit! This column … right.
Anyway, it seems to be more common these days. Happening more often.
Sometimes it’s little things. Like leaving the toaster on. Or forgetting to put the cap back on the milk.
There was a green plastic cap sitting on the counter. I saw this and did what comes naturally to most family men in the household: blamed everyone else.
“Hey y’all, anyone know where this cap goes?” I said. “Because clearly it goes to something. Because caps don’t exist in nature all by themselves. And clearly it was one of you because I am infallible, recognize the value of ‘cap management’ and never leave anything out rather than putting it back in its rightful place where it is ‘capping’ something. So, yeah, who did it?”
The next day I went to get the milk – which pretty much only I use – tried to unscrew the cap and noticed something odd: it wasn’t there! I then the made the mistake of saying out loud, “Hey y’all, who forgot to put the cap back on MY milk? You know, the milk only I drank? It’s a green cap? Just like the same green cap I found sitting out on the counter yesterday that y’all … uhhh … never mind.”
That was a doozy.
There are others. One day I drove to work, got there and realized I didn’t have my phone. Worse, I thought to myself: “OK, this is fine. I’ll just call my wife, see if she’s still home and ask her to bring it to me. WAIT!!! Where’s my phone?!?”
Dangit!
Another day I walked in to work and half-way there realized I hadn’t put on deodorant.
And maybe the topper of them all, I was working in the yard the other day, finished up and went to take a shower. All went about as usual. I started scrubbing the filth off me, got lost in a daydream – maybe about what the top speed of a butterfly is – and then found myself wondering as I was about to get out, “Did I wash my feet?”
Now, this is a pretty dumb question. First off, to be sure, all you have to do is bend your legs at the knees, look down and check. Or, like rational people, just do the unthinkable and wash them again. You know, to be sure. But my back was sore and that seemed like an awful lot of unnecessary work.
I reasoned that no one scrubs themselves down and then totally forgets their feet. I mean, what kind of uncivilized Neanderthal would get into the shower, lose track of what they were doing, start thinking about speed-demon butterflies and then get out of the shower with dirty toes?
So I toweled off, got out, looked down and marveled at the faint, but definitely muddy footprint I had just left.
DANG IT!!!
I guess I’ve always been like this. But the older you get, the more it starts to worry you. Absent-minded? Too many things on my mind? Or something worse?
The Internet doesn’t help. As if on cue, I started noticing stories about forgetting things, and what it could mean. The Web was filling my head with lots of inane worries thanks to headlines like: “Early onset dementia more common than you think … especially if you forget your deodorant regularly” or “Scatterbrained man lost in woods. Family didn’t go looking because he blamed them for missing milk cap.”
I’m a chronic worrier, and could probably be a pretty successful hypochondriac. If there is a new disease out there, I usually worry I have a symptom. So this has me spooked. Or am I making too much out of this? Why do we do that?
More likely, it’s just the toll of a crazy year and too many things on my mind (I mean, seriously: If a butterfly really trained, how fast could it go?) Maybe the lesson is to slow down. To focus more. To not get lost in the meteor shower of thoughts that always screech toward us. And for goodness sake: To bend over and check those toes before getting out of the shower.