Drop it! Lose it! (Old coot article published March 25, 2010

The Old Coot has a screw loose.

By Merlin Lessler

I dropped a small screw in the kitchen the other day. Not a miniature one, like the one that fell out of my glasses. I never did find that one; I ended up fixing them with a bent paperclip. It gave me a dorky look, but not as bad as when they snapped apart at the nose piece and I wrapped the break with adhesive tape. Now that was dorky of the highest order. One, unfortunately, I’m well acquainted with. But, back to the screw that I dropped the other day; it was an inch long and should have been easy to spot. It wasn’t! I scanned the area where I expected it to be and then had to widen the search perimeter. To no avail. I was irked, determined to not let it escape. I finally found it; well I didn’t actually “find” it – I stepped on it as I was walking out of the room. Barefoot. Ouch! It was in the doorway, ten feet beyond where I’d been looking.

Whenever I drop something, it seems to go much farther that I expect. Even a piece of popcorn, a light fluffy object that should be easy to retrieve, travels a surprising distance and then disappears. The same thing happens with a peanut, a paper clip or other small item. They elude me when I try to see where they’ve landed. It’s nature’s cruel joke on old coots.  The older I get, the harder it is to get down on my hands & knees to search for things. And, the farther I have to crawl to find it, the harder it is to get back up. When I do locate the item and get back to my feet, I’ve forgotten what I was going to do with it. I stand there like a dummy, holding it in my hand, looking around the room hoping to jar my memory. It’s an “Attention Span” disorder. Quite normal for old coots like me.   

That’s why I’ll never undergo surgery with a physician my age. The O.R. nurse will hand him an instrument, he’ll listen to the music for a minute (it’s his favorite Beetle’s song) and then look down at the scalpel in his hand and ask himself, “Now, what was I going to do with this?” He’ll surely mess me up and I do not want to be one of those people paraded out in attorney ads on TV, who brag about how much they collected using Butthead, Getum & Milkum Attorneys at Law. TV stations would go broke without ad revenue from these ambulance chasers. You and I end up paying for the settlements (and the ads) in higher insurance rates. I’d sue them, but when I got on the witness stand my mind would probably go blank. (Now why am I here?)   

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