Ever wonder if your life isn't some huge Rube Goldberg contraption that, at the end, doesn't capture a mouse but instead blows up in your face?
I got hit in the head with a bicycle rack the other day. And it wasn't even the worst thing that happened to me.
Our youngest daughter took advantage of the University of Arkansas' fall break to fly off to see a friend from high school. She also took that opportunity to park her car and her cat at our house.
The car, I got. It needed an oil-and-various-other-stuff-that-seem-pretty-important change, new tires and some TLC.
The cat was another story, one that has very little to do with me assaulting myself with a bike rack. However, it is important to note the feline footnote used to live with us, and had, upon taking up residence in a one-bedroom in Fayetteville, become, basically, bowling-pin shaped.
My daughter reasoned that, if she had the cat stay with us, it might actually move around and drop a few pounds. The cat though "Oh look, more chairs and sofas upon which to sleep." Net result: not exactly a spa weekend for a tabby. But I digress.
So, with the cat safely snoozing away (except for brief moments when it rousted itself to action to pounce on the smallest of our dogs before passing out from exhaustion), the Lovely Mrs. Smith and I turned our attention to the auto we were car-sitting.
From the outside, my daughter's car is a fairly nice-looking, sporty-enough deal. This is a testament to engineering, styling and the fact the windows are tinted, which keeps passers-by from seeing the back seat.
Not that they could actually SEE the seat. The condition of the vehicle is such that we begin to wonder if paying rent isn't redundant, since it appears she actually lives in it.
If you stuck with me for this long, you're probably wondering how all of this winds along to the intersection of a bike rack and my noggin. Well, I did get hit in the head, so it's possible it doesn't and that any minute now I'll start typing in a foreign language. Keep reading. You never know.
Upon cleaning up Little Miss Sunshine's car, we neatly boxed up all the spare stuff of her life and put it in the trunk. And doing so left a little less than the amount of room needed to store a suitcase. An important fact for later.
So, when she arrived back, we greeted her at the airport in our family car. When we arrived at our home, closer to midnight than I'd like it to be, I decided to be Good Dad and load her suitcase in her vehicle.
That's where the trunk, and, specifically, the bike rack attached to it, comes into play. In an effort to wedge the suitcase into the small opening left in the trunk, I sort of propped open the hatch. So when the suitcase finally came to rest, the trunk lid "un-propped" and the bike rack poleaxed me.
As a reminder, I wear hearing aids. Which are located on my ears, along with the earpieces of my glasses. So, when a bike rack lands on your head, it has a tendency to knock off your glasses. Which has a tendency to send your hearing aids spinning off into that good, very dark night.
Under normal circumstances, or at least circumstances that didn't involve blunt force trauma, I might have noticed that. Under actual circumstances, I spent a lot of time staggering around the driveway, wondering why the stars appeared to be going in and out of focus before realizing it was a very overcast evening.
All of which explains why I didn't actually notice my hearing aids were missing until about half an hour later, after my daughter had driven off and I was getting ready for bed.
So, if you were driving down my street about midnight earlier this week and saw two people staggering around, waving flashlights at the ground like they were signaling for help and forgot how, well, now you know.
At some point in most marriages, you give up trying to correct certain behaviors and just notice them. But for anyone else, if, for some reason I lose my hearing aids and you want to help me find them, don't say, "well, where did you put them?" Because, I didn't put them anywhere; the bike rack did, and it's not telling. And, realize that, without my hearing aids, I can't actually, you know, hear you. So asking me is both pointless and frustrating for you. Me? I won't care. Can't hear you, anyway.
Luckily, I managed to find both aids, which apparently came as a sign that Providence got tired of the joke and allowed me to stagger upon them.
So all's well that ends with a goose egg on the head, an elevated heart rate and a renewed ability to hear. This time around I escaped the trap. And that's not the worst thing that could happen.
Commentary on 10/21/2016