by ideadog.com

Of course when we find our car keys or the remote control we don’t keep looking for them because they are always in the last place we look. You don’t continue searching and look one more place after you’ve already found your (glasses). This is a tired old insight that I’m sure lots of comedians have had fun with.

I suggest that in some sense we ought to keep looking for our proverbial keys after we’ve found them. Even if you have oatmeal in your head (sorry — I’ve been indelicate and let a prejudice slip; what I mean is that even before our cognitive development is complete at age 18 or 32 or so and the oatmeal of youth has worked its way out of our brains and been replaced with actual brain matter) — even at that young age we begin to develop preferences. Spicy food: like. American-made cars: don’t like. Vacation in hot places: don’t like. Tequila sunrises: like. And so on down the checklist.

Sometime well after the oatmeal is out of your brain, and before you even realize it, your lifetime of accumulated preferences will have you standing out at the same auto dealership purchasing your fourteenth consecutive Buick and unwilling to travel without your favorite pillow because you know that’s the perfect way to live. You’ll send your coffee back if it isn’t strong enough, won’t sleep in anything but high-thread-count sheets, and will eat only at predictable restaurants (but sitting only at tables, not in booths, which just aren’t comfortable, and you sure as hell won’t like the new waitress).

Whew! Let’s pause for a moment to let this fog of gloominess lift.

Striped pants? Not me! I'd sooner drive a stick-shift Honda while eating anchovies and drinking a decaf coffee!

OK. On the bright side, you’ll eventually enter retirement, during which time your otherwise active and still sharp mind will noodle away at whatever’s there to chew on after the morning crossword puzzle.

After retirement, my own parents applied their minds to worrying about obscure Internet searches or exactly how the newspaper was delivered, one of them telling the paperboy for the Nth time that it should go all the way through the slot like this — just so — not left hanging out of the slot where it will get rained on and let bugs into the porch, but not pushed in so far that it lands beyond the table on the porch floor, and so on, and the other one searching (or rather, trying to enlist me to search) for obscure movies or books or songs or the name of the actor who had such-and-such line in a movie that may or may not have been about India, and so on. Talk about managers with nothing to manage!

Whew! Pause again. This time for me.

I’m better now.

I, of course, am confident in the knowledge that the oatmeal is out of my head and also that I have oh-so-very-important things to think about and do all day because I’m still in that decades-long window between being an oatmealer and a retiree. Yet the hyenas of Buickness may be snapping at the gate: I am reminded that my father once tried to leave the house for a good ten minutes before he gave up because he couldn’t find his keys. Resigned, he took his hat off and there they were inside of it. Tell me that wouldn’t cause you to lie awake worried at night!

Now, John Masengarb has corrected me in another article that’s printed in the pages of this issue. Apparently I got the Latin name for Creeping Charlie a bit mixed up and my movement to have people call it "Sweet Lisa" may be doomed from the start due to a shaky foundation. I suspected that anyway. Am I bitter? No no. John has a master’s degree in horticultural science and my main qualification in these matters is that I hate yard work. I know when to stand corrected. And in fact I’m standing up here on my soapbox telling you that we all need to stand corrected once in a while, to keep our minds sharp on the important problems in life, to not obsess about the minute and the mundane, and somehow, at least symbolically, to keep trying new things even if we think we’ve found the answer.

Now, if I can only find my keys...