Sometimes I look for me everywhere. My wild, hare-brained thoughts keep me in contention for the "Dumb-Bunny-of-the-Month" award. Read on.
I was invited to Mensa's July luncheon meeting at a Traverse City restaurant to rattle on about my column (especially the "England saga") and mingle with the folks. It had been in my date book for nearly five months.
To quote Google: "Mensa, an international society, has only one requirement for membership -- a score in the top 2 percent on a standardized IQ test. It's not political, holds no opinions, but serves as a social organization, and promotes research in the area of human intelligence."
This meeting would be really interesting.
I laid out some nice clothes so as to make a good impression. (I clean up pretty well, but it's a struggle ...)
Anyway, the big day came. I got the garden chores done, and, humming, collected all my tools ... and then I saw the algae. It sat by the pool, on a wet brick, looking particularly beguiling, dressed in lovely colors -- gray-green with blue flecks, along with a splash of orangey-brown, and it hosted interesting bugs. (Uh-oh; hands-and-knees time.) A ladybug was a ruby atop the algae; an earwig wandered underneath the brick; ants, ignoring it, marched out of a hole next door, busy with their own agendas. I admired the formidable pincers on the earwig's rear end, and wondered how it must feel to drag that equipment around one's whole life. How did it manage to mate? Ouch ...
It doesn't take a Mensa member to see where this is going.
I got lost. As surely as a bat with its radar down, I got lost. Knees-in-grass I conjured up silly scenarios -- imagining the armed earwig waging backside battles with pill bugs, ants and the odd microorganism. Hmmm ... Could algae learn to display colors when sensing destructive feet, mimicking annoyed octopuses (octopi)?
Meanwhile, visitors came and went, time passed, I dreamed.
Knowing I fall into "mental rabbit holes" at awkward times, I've made rules. Here's one: Never "disappear" while cooking. Why? Bored with sauteing a chicken's thigh this past June I'd mentally wandered off: Would a major eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma trigger a monumental landslide that would trigger a mega-tsunami that would overwhelm America's Eastern seaboard?
The neglected chicken went ballistic; the fire alarm squawked, triggering a call from Minneapolis headquarters. Only then did I finally notice smoke and bounce back ...
Groan ... Obviously, I hadn't learned from this embarrassment. (I was a space cadet in elementary school: it's not new behavior.)
Anyway, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess the rest.
When my neglected stomach finally growled, I trotted reluctantly into the house to sniff around for food, and realized there wasn't any. Huh. How could I have forgotten to visit the grocery? Then, BANG! I was rocked! Nooooo ... To say "horrified" is to barely graze the surface of my chagrin. Lost in spaceiness I'd forgotten the lunch I'd anticipated for weeks.
Flame-cheeked, I reassembled myself just enough to ring the restaurant. The club's chairman came on -- by then, everyone was leaving -- and I fervently apologized, but it was an edited truth. How could I explain what had really happened -- that I'd "tripped out" on algae? How would THAT go over?
He was very kind to me, and incredibly gracious, something this dummy, feeling like slime mold, certainly didn't deserve. I'd flunked the test that really mattered. What's that sage observation -- "One is judged by the company one keeps ..."
But schmoozing with brain-dead algae, for heaven's sake?
Telling, eh?
Dee Blair's Sunnybank Gardens are at 325 Sixth St. in Traverse City. Visit her Web site, www.deeblair.com for more information. Find more of her columns online at record-eagle.com/deeblair.
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