Just One Thing

"Just one thing." I never got that. I'm sure there are answers to be found on the web-- I mean 102,000 results in 0.41 seconds (I know, for-ever) but, personally, I never got the whole just one thing bit.

Until Thursday afternoon.  Now I get it. Now I know.

Tuesday morning dawned with the terrible triad: Late for work, couldn't find my office keys, and my glasses were MIA. The latter really bugged me. I knew I'd worn them home the afternoon prior. Beyond that, I could not remember where the H I would have set them down. They weren't in any of the usual places. They weren't in my coat or the shirt I'd worn the day before, or the pants. Nor were they in any of the unusual places in this drafty old house. They were just quite simply gone. The office keys, however, were easily located in the back pocket of my khakis as I, annoyed as heck, plopped down hard on the frozen front seat of my car. One problem solved.

For two days I lamented the passing of one of my favorite pairs of glasses. There are others in this house but the missing pair were of the go-to-work, look-smart, expensive variety and they would have to be replaced.

Years and marriages ago, I had a brother living on a farm in, what we refer to here in the Great Lakes State as, far-northern-lower-Michigan, or more simply, “up north.” It’s a land of hardwood forests, lakes and streams. It’s a land populated by mosquitoes, black flies, and "no-see'ms" in the summer, deer hunters in the fall, and snowmobilers in the winter.

We used to joke about the two old above ground fuel storage tanks that stood at the end of the driveway on that farm: one tank for insect repellant, one for lotion we’d say. Those are both seasonally requisite items here. In the summer: gallons of insect repellant.  In the winter: buckets of lotion. When the entire landscape freezes for months on end, a person’s skin will take on the cracks, wrinkles, and scales of a tortoise if not properly cared for. It’s a lesson I’ve learned and I’m never far from a shot of lotion for face and hands. 

(Ready?) And that leads me to my lost glasses-- lost, that is, until yesterday when I decided I should stop in the surgery bathroom and put some lotion on my face and hands prior to leaving and heading out into the arctic cold. Just like I’d done three evenings before. The glasses? Not lost, stolen, or destroyed. They were right where I left them 3 evenings before: Perched on a roll of toilet paper on a counter in the surgery bathroom. Guess when I take them off I'm not as smart I look with them on.

And now, coming painfully full circle: 

As a person ages, it really is about just one thing: 

             Remember where the hell you put it!  Life’s too short to spend your time looking.