My childhood friend (the one you keep reading about) emailed me a hilarious picture today titled “The Annihilation of an Onion.” It seems she bought the afore mentioned root vegetable months ago, put it in her bottom veggie bin and forgot it. Oh, what a picture!
There it sits in its little pink plastic onion-domed container, either foaming at the mouth or nestled under a lacy blanket, depending on your interpretation. My pal added a smiley face saying our high school biology teacher would have given her extra credit.
I KNEW there was a reason I love this girl! First, you must understand that she keeps the cleanest house probably in all of Utah, where I’m told many women compete for the title. As one who isn’t even on the ballot for the that election, I found it encouraging to know that even she sometimes has these little “episodes.”
I swear she works hard in her crusade against dust, grit and grime, but she says she’s just trying to keep her place from looking like something from the Dust Bowl era. In either case, I’m amazed this little onion had the nerve to fan its nose at the resident taskmaster. In my response, I said, “Too bad it wasn’t loose in the drawer so you could have fun taking out the bin, washing the whole thing and then threading it back onto those impossible-to-find tracks.”
She said, “This isn’t a cleanliness issue. It’s a memory one.” Even better! The next time I’m reminded (not always kindly) by my husband or children about the latest thing I forgot, I’ll just think of my pal and know I’m not alone.
So I get a triple bonus: a friend who trusts me enough to know I won’t judge her for having a science experiment in her fridge; someone who makes me laugh and feel better about my own shortcomings; and a reminder that we don’t have to be edging into dementia just because we forget something occasionally.
So many of us who grew up in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s feel we must present the façade of perfection: a tidy home, a lovely family, a pristine fridge and floors we could eat off of. Speaking of the expression, why would we want to do that?? Sounds pretty uncomfortable to me, especially now that I’m the age when getting up from that floor is akin to climbing Mt. Everest. How many times have I looked at the random item I dropped and thought, “Now how badly do I WANT that?”
Maybe if we’d all stop chasing perfection, we’d have more fun and more friends. Meanwhile, I promised my buddy that I’ll take some pictures of my veggie bin contents and we’ll see which Old Schooler deserves the most extra credit.
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