What Makes Me Laugh

Yesterday I got an unexpected call from my massage therapist. “Hey, I’m looking for Doug. He hasn’t shown up for his appointment yet and I can’t reach him on his phone. I’m just wondering if he’s lost.”

Lost? In Livingston? This was theoretically possible since it was his first appointment with her, but I thought I had provided adequate directions the night before when he asked me if I knew how to get to her house.

“Oh, she lives just down the street from Mary,” I said, with a wave of my hand as if that wave would fill in the necessary details.

“She said something about turning down an alley,” he muttered.

I should have known then that I needed to be more explicit.

He called me fifteen minutes after his appointment had passed and I asked, “What happened?”

‘”I’ve just spent a half hour driving around a three block area,” he said. I could tell he was frustrated. “I still don’t know where she lives. I finally flagged a woman down in her yard and asked her, ‘Do you know a woman named Allison? She’s petite? Blonde? She gives massages.’”

The woman denied knowing Allison even though they lived next door to each other. “Don’t you get it?” I laughed. ”She probably thought you were a stalker!”

“Especially since I drove around the block slowly for a half hour.”

Anyway, Doug had to reschedule his appointment because he was so late, and he’s certain to have started a neighborhood watch alert in the process, but this is not something that typically happens to him. It typically happens to me.

My sense of direction is literally nonexistent. When I have to guess, it’s almost always the wrong guess. I once got lost during a run where I only made two right turns, and ended up causing my in-laws to be late for their daughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner. 

 This happens to me all the time. In fact, I now have to deliberate over whether I should go the other way just because my intuition told me the opposite.

My mother has this problem (so it’s inherited), but she is absolutely sure she’s right when she’s telling you which way to turn while driving. “Right, turn right,” she commands, and you do it, and then you spend 15 minutes trying to get turned around so that you can go left again.

Whereas, my brother inherited my father’s directional gifts including a superhuman talent that enables him to find his way anywhere in any city around the world without a map. He’s like a walking GPS unit.What I could do with this power!

I, on the other hand, struggle to grasp the concept of north, south, east, and west. Right now, I am in terror of anyone asking me which way is north in Bozeman. Seriously.

 Combine this lack of direction with the unwillingness to ask for directions (my pride will not suffer such a fall) and you usually have a recipe for disaster. Let’s just say that I have to add in an extra half hour for any appointment at a new place, and I could use a GPS unit in my car. Doug wouldn’t need one if I gave better directions.

Only one rule applies when you’ve lost something: The last thing you’ll remember about it is saying, “I need to put this in a special place so I don’t lose it.”

On Friday, I returned from a work trip feeling a little sore, tired, and cranky. Doug had made a special effort to keep a clean house while I was gone, and it was wonderful to walk into a neat and tidy living room. There was just one problem. Something smelled. I didn’t know what it was, or quite where it was, but it was funky.

 ”Something smells,” I told Doug, going through my usual litany of questions like he was on the witness stand.

“How long has the laundry  been in the washer?” “Did you take the compost out?” “Is the garbage empty?” “How about the litter box?”

Poor guy. He had obviously made an effort to clean the house, and I was ruining his good job by grousing about the hint of something only slightly foul that kept floating through the air. I kept sniffing around the house, and finally decided that the new kitty litter made out of corn was the problem, so I headed to the store for a replacement. 

The only problem was — I couldn’t find my wallet. I had walked in the house with it, that I knew, and I remembered thinking that I should put it somewhere where it wouldn’t get lost because I didn’t know where my regular purse was (I was carrying it in a backpack). I searched the usual spots — countertops, bedspreads, my backpack, the dirty wash — and it was nowhere to be found. 

I went outside, where Doug was finishing putting in the hoses for the garden. “I lost my wallet,” I said. “It’s in the house somewhere, but I don’t know where. Can you help me find it?”

Doug agreed to help search for awhile. Meanwhile, I was thinking that if it had been the reverse situation, I would have known immediately where his wallet was and could have described to him in minute detail its location from a satellite phone. But men (at least my particular male) don’t really like to keep track of their spouse’s possessions. Anyway, he went outside, and I finally found the wallet in a corner of the entryway, where it had fallen out of my backpack. Was that the special place?

I shook my head at myself and went to the store. Shopping took about 20 minutes, but the lines were long at checkout, and just as I was about to reach the cashier I started to rummage in my purse and realized that my wallet wasn’t in it. I searched it, and then searched it again. Na da. I almost slapped my palm against my head. I had put it on my desk and not in my purse before I left (don’t ask me why). So, I slipped out of line trying to act like I forgot to buy mayonnaise or something, and left my full cart in the back of the canned goods aisle. Zipped home. Picked up wallet. Zipped back to store. Cart still there!

When I got back to the house Doug was walking around the house naked trying to find the New Yorker and Reader’s Digest. I swear to god. He had undressed for a bath, and then realized that the magazines he had set aside “in a special place” that morning to read in the tub had somehow disappeared. 

“Here’s one from April!” I shouted from the bedroom.

“No, I’m looking for the latest one!” he shouted back.

We searched high and low and I made sure all the curtains were drawn. Finally, after I had searched the same place four times, I heard, “Ha! I found it!”

“Where were they?”

“In the clothes basket,” he said. “Buried under a bunch of your stuff.” I think I detected just the slightest hint of accusation in his tone before I heard him slip into the bathtub and give a small yelp. 

“What’s wrong?”

“The water got cold while we searched.”