Funny Things Happen

My family thinks I should write a book. This is because funny things seem to happen to us.  Some of them are actually our fault, others not.

One example occurred a long time ago, the first time I pumped my own gas.

It was the late 1970’s, not long after they came out with self-serve pumps and also just after I got my driver’s license at the age of 19. When I went up to the cashier’s window to pay I said, “I got five dollars on pump number 89.”

“What?” the young man asked.

“Well, that was the number on the pump,” I informed him.

“That’s the octane level,” he replied.

“Oh,” I said as I handed him my bill, then briskly left.

Another time when I was about the same age, my husband and I were driving out Hwy. 21.  There was a sign along the side of the road advertising a turkey shoot.  I had never heard of this before and, animal lover that I was, blurted out to my husband, "You mean they line those turkeys up and shoot them!"

Then there was the time I walked past one of my telecourse professors at Jefferson College.  I had taken the telecourse over the summer and was back on campus the following fall. I had never actually met the professor, since my telecourse was completed through the mail, though I knew him by sight.

As we passed each other I noticed him smiling at me.  The course had required quite a few writing assignments and I just assumed he was smiling because he recognized me.

“There’s that Cathy Murphy. What a writer she is. Hers were just about the best essays I’ve ever read,” I imagined him thinking.

I went along to my classroom and sat down, my pride increasing by the minute. As I set about organizing my things, however, I noticed the front of my shirt was just about covered in graham cracker crumbs from the snack I quickly ate on my way to school.

And that, I realized, was the reason he was smiling.

Another situation occurred simply because I had too much to do. We had five kids, the youngest, twin girls, who were about three. Once when my family and I attended a religious convention, my dress kept choking me around the neck.  During the drive there and throughout the morning, I kept pulling at the collar of my dress because it kept choking me.  Finally, about half way through the day’s program as I was again pulling at the front of my collar, I felt the tags that would normally have been in the back of the dress and realized with a sudden horror that I had my dress on backwards!

As usual, we had arrived late to the program, so I imagined all 700-plus people who saw me walk down the aisle must have been thinking to themselves, "That lady has her dress on backwards!"  I waited for lunch break, when people would be up and about, figuring I wouldn't be as noticeable and went in to the bathroom to correct the problem. 

To rub salt into that wound, I was once with some friends and told them my funny story about spending a morning with my dress on backwards. When I returned home and went into the bathroom to freshen up, I saw I was wearing two different earrings. I always wondered if they noticed.

One situation I found myself in was fully the fault of kids.  I went out into the yard one morning and noticed the swings on the swing set were misaligned, again. Someone, maybe the neighbor boys as a joke, would always misalign the chains of the swings so they would hang unevenly.  I approached the set to repair the damage when my hair - I used to wear it in a long braid down to my waist - got caught in the chain links of one of the swings.

The harder I tried to free myself, the worse it got. I was stuck fast to that swing.

At first I hoped no one noticed, but after several minutes and coming close to resorting to yelling out, “Help!” I found myself wishing someone would come to my rescue.

Finally, after taking some deep breaths, I slowly felt my way through the knotted mess and got myself free.  That evening when I told my husband about my ordeal, he said, “Well, you could have just unhooked the chains at the top and brought it into the house.  “Oh, that would look cute,” I said. “walking into the house while holding a swing up to my head.”

My sister seems to have a similar problem, only she doesn’t have kids.

Once she moved into a tiny apartment that came with a tiny dishwasher. Because she and I always had to wash dishes when we were kids, she refuses to do it anymore and insisted on using that dishwasher.

She told me that after a while she noticed the dishes weren’t getting clean and the dishwasher smelled, so she called in the maintenance man.  She said he pulled the dishwasher out into the middle of the kitchen, hooked it up to the faucet and turned it on, only to have bubbles come out all over.  The maintenance man told her she was using too much soap.

“A lot of people do that with these things,” he said.

So my sister cut way back on the soap and continued to use the dishwasher. After a few weeks, however, the same problem was occurring, so she called the maintenance man back a second time.

Again he pulled the machine into the middle of the kitchen and hooked it up to the faucet. This time she asked him something she had wondered about during his first visit.

“Why do you hook it up to the faucet like that?” she asked.

“Well, you gotta have water to use it,” was his surprised response.

My daughter has apparently inherited my sense of direction.  Soon after they moved to their home in St. Charles, she went to the store, but got lost on the way home.  She was only ten minutes away but it took her two hours to get back home.  At the end of her harrowing adventure, she was speaking with her husband again on the cell phone as he tried to direct her.  As he stood in the front yard with the phone to his ear, he watched as my daughter drove down the street right past their house!

She thought she had entered their street at the other end, so thought their home would be further down.  She learned then her street ended in a cul-de-sac.

On another occassion, my sister, mom and I were on our way to a wedding.  On our way, I pulled into a gas station to fill up. My sister jumped out of the passenger side and said, “I’ll pump.”

I got out and said, “OK. I’ll go in and pay.” As I headed for the store I stopped, turned around and said, “Let’s see, what pump number is this?” at which point our mother, who heard me through the open car window, looked up at the pump and said, “Let’s see. It looks like number 89 to me.”

It’s got to be heredity.