The Old Coot dances to a different beat. (July 24, 2019 Article)

The Old Coot dances to a different beat.

By Merlin Lessler

It’s the wedding season and they’ll be doing the Hokey-Pokey at many of the receptions. I don’t know why; nobody does, but that’s what happens. Old coots don’t do the Hokey Pokey. We do the Zig-Zag, sometimes called the Herky-Jerky. When we walk across a room, for example, to put a book on a shelf and spot a hat by the sofa that belongs in the car, we halt, start toward it, and then come to a sudden stop, realizing that the book won’t make it to the shelf if we get distracted. Later in the day, we’ll wonder where it is. We know this, because we get sidetracked all the time. In this case, we stop, do a zig, turn around, do a zag, ignore the hat and keep on to the bookshelf, spending a minute or so getting it into the right spot. That zig-zag saves us. Mission accomplished!

On the way back from the bookshelf, we don’t notice the hat; we forgot all about it. Besides, we’re deep in thought, patting our self on the back for putting the book on the shelf. Then, we start to wonder – “What was it that caused me to do the Zig-Zag?” Nothing comes to mind. We shrug it off. Later in the day, in the car, we can’t find the hat that was supposed to be there. “Now where did that get to,” we say to the steering wheel. We do a lot of that, talking to inanimate objects: the steering wheel, the refrigerator, the TV, the cupboard, even the dog and the cat get a good dose of our queries.

Anyone who happened to see this event wouldn’t think anything of it, wouldn’t even notice the Zig-Zag route we took because that’s how we walk all the time. Follow one of us down an aisle in the supermarket or along a sidewalk and you realize we never go in a straight line. Our path is always an erratic zig and zag, interspaced with a stumble, followed by a lurch (which is the Herky-Jerky). No, old coots don’t do the Hokey Pokey; we’ve got our own favorite dance step and we don’t have to wait for a wedding to do it. The Hokey Pokey is way overrated anyway!

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