That Forgetful, Distracted Problem

Somehow we manage to get along in life without too much trouble, but it does seem that we have a tendency to be more forgetful than we once were. Or is it possible that we just have time to sit down and remember what we forgot? Let’s think about that one for a minute or two.

I can remember losing my keys when I took the kids downtown to tumbling classes at the Y. The keys were locked in the car, so they weren’t really lost. But I did forget to put money in the parking meter and got a parking ticket. Keeping up with kids CAN be enough to distract a person. Anyway, we had another set of keys and the parking ticket didn’t cost too much.

Locking the keys in the car—both sets—got to be a bit of a problem at a Little League game one day. We were BOTH at the game and I wanted to lock my purse in the car. I had the car locked before he could turn around and get his keys. Oh boy! That time it took someone with the right tools to get the car unlocked. And no, I didn’t do THAT again.

The kids have been grown and gone for years now, but both of us are still easily distracted. He cleans out the tool shed and blows out the vents on a motor of some sort. Then he dumps the leaf blower and forgets to turn off the air compressor. During the evening it sits there and does its little tune and goes whump, whump, whump, shhhhhhh. When I remind him that he left the compressor on, it irritates him. So I either go turn off the compressor or do my best to ignore it.

It seems that some tendencies are more inclined to be noticed in women. His grandmother used to live in our back yard. When she got ready to move in with one of her daughters, her daughter told us to clean out Grandma’s cabinets and keep the food. Grandma always had given me her grocery list to fill whenever I went to buy groceries. When we cleaned out her cabinet there were fifteen cans of green beans. So, I didn’t feel so bad when I noticed that I had bought another box of instant rice and had also picked up another box of soda. These things come in handy. But FIFTEEN cans of green beans!

And then there is the parking problem. Now that we have a handicap license, it is usually not too difficult to find his truck. But if I go anywhere by myself, I have to try to remember WHAT I drove and WHERE I put it. We both laughed just the other day as we were walking into Wal-Mart. A mother and her “tween” daughter were coming out of the door and we heard Mom say, “Now, do you remember where we put the car?” As we started laughing, the mother said something about being so distracted. I just nodded my head. I knew perfectly well what she meant.

Since our kids rode the bus home from school, I never really had to remember to go pick them up—until the year that the middle child worked as a crosswalk guard. She didn’t do it every week, and I would forget which week she worked—and forget to go pick her up. Several times that year I got a phone call from a little voice, “Mom, did you forget to pick me up?”

We forget doctors’ appointments now, but so far we have neither one forgotten to pick the other up if we are both supposed to be somewhere. But now that I think about this forgetfulness thing, I have decided that it is blown WAY out of proportion. That, and I have ALWAYS been this way. It is just that now it is easier to forget which day of the week it is, which doctor we are supposed to see, or which one of us is supposed to be going. Oh well. One of these days we will be so forgetful that we won’t remember to be concerned about being forgetful. Until then, I think we should just forget about it.