Many days start with me toying with topics
to write about in my blog. If I’m really
lucky they pop almost out of nowhere; often as not they’re hidden in statements
of written text I happen to be reading; books, magazines, cereal boxes, the
like. Or they sometimes are fragments of
a radio conversation; sometimes even in my own discussions with others. Every so often something happens that draws
my attention and presto that blossoms into a chain of thoughts that congeal into
specific narrative on facets of living.
All of that as a preamble to a mystery I’ve been aware of most of my life,
but where the incidents are so space apart that I only ponder them for a brief
time and then forget about it as I am enamored by other sparkly qualities
manifesting before my attention.
I
was getting into the shower while rehearsing in my mind what I was preparing
for today’s entry. I distinctly remember
taking a band-aid off my index finger that was protecting a healing nail. I put it on a shelf near the shower
door. As I was doing my business I was visiting
in my memory a photo of a cat looking at a goldfish in a bowl and pondering the
condition of inside. A fish inside a
bowl, with a cat watching inside a room, inside an apartment , inside a city,
inside a country you know, appreciating the telescopic nature of the
universe. Just as I was concluding my
ritual I noticed the band-aid was no longer on the shelf. I looked to the floor, nada. I looked at the drain entertaining the
possibility that unnoticed by me the band-aid was washed to the floor and maybe
down the drain? No way, the darn thing was at least an inch long and half as
wide, and in this case crumbled into a ball. The holes in the drains were
fractions of the mass, even if I tried to stomp it through I couldn’t do it; and
of course I had not. I was in earnest to solve the riddle of the
missing band-aid. Was I so focused on my thoughts that my half-ritual process
tossed the band-aid out of the shower? I
looked on the sink, the floor, heck I even got out of the shower and walked into
the toilet room, then looked in the waste basket; no band-aid.
“Well
what the heck?”
Was
this yet another visit to the lost-sock-in-the-wash land? Countless times having done wash bringing
clothes and towels up to be folded find there’s one missing sock. Check the dryer and the washer and never finding the socks mate. Nor did the sock
ever come up out of nowhere, like say dropped on the stairs or on the carpet,
or stuck to the cat. Where did that sock
go? Talking to others they too had similar
experiences, heck I’ve heard comedians build entire routines out of talking on where do lost socks go?
Are we in a
leaky universe? Am I finding evidence
that perhaps those leaks are becoming more frequent, or getting bigger? Is that
what the Rapture will be? Where the leaks get so big entire people will fall
through the rips that previously only accommodated socks and small items like
band-aids?
I told my wife about all of
this, she mentioned I was going on a strict reduced caffeine diet starting now.
That’s what I get for being observant. Maybe when one day she finds herself on a
mountain of socks and band-aids she’ll realize I was really warning her of
pending doom. I like that word doom; it
has no boundaries, it lets the imagination leak into it. Yeah, place it on the
shelf in an alternate universe with all those single socks, used band-aids, and who knows what else.
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