Things happen to me for no apparent reason. Why, I ask?
I have trouble remembering names. This is common among older people, I know, but that hardly offers an explanation. I’ve known Alice for years. I may have seen her only the day before. I can offer you abundant biographical data about her, tell you the times she and her husband vacationed or went to concerts with us. Her face appears vividly in my mind’s eye but her name stubbornly eludes me, like a pesky mosquito continually buzzing my ear that evades any attempt to get him. Hours later when going to bed, the name comes to me. Forget it! It’s too late now. This aggravates me no end.
I’m curious to know why things happen as they do. It’s my nature. As a child I asked questions all the time. My mother would tire of trying to answer them. When she’d had enough, she’d answer, “Because!” Her comment brought closure but offered little by way of explanation.
I’m a punctual person. I’m where I’m supposed to be because I leave myself plenty of time. Occasionally I’ll get a late start. I feel frantic and race to make up time. As I do, two things inexplicability happen with such regularity that I grow curious.
As soon as I’m on the road, a school bus appears in front of me traveling a route along which children are being picked up about every two hundred yards. On a good day that can cost me fifteen minutes. On a bad one it can make me an hour late. If that doesn’t happen then I’ll be stuck behind a blue haired lady driving a Buick LaSabre along the St. Michaels Road doing twenty five miles an hour in a fifty per hour zone. Her silver head appears only slightly above the wheel, both hands gripping it as though fiercely determined to make her destination despite all odds. I sputter to myself contemptuously; “Somebody’s grandmother.” Occasionally it’s somebody’s grandfather.
When I’m late, it’s mostly for one reason. I can’t find my car keys. They’re always right by the telephone but whenever I look, I don’t see them. Why, I don’t understand.
“Where are my keys?” I’ll yell to my wife. She responds wearily, “right by the telephone where you put them last night.” I look again. Indeed the keys are right there. Her comment, “where you put them last night” I find unnecessary. It’s a thinly disguised putdown, expressed sotto voce, as only wives can do. I’d have to own, however, that men seem to have more trouble negotiating the minute contingencies of domestic life like finding socks that match, the brief case, keys, sun glasses and the like. Still, it doesn’t add to domestic tranquility for wives to rub it in.
I’m baffled why, in slow traffic, no matter which lane I’m in, it soon becomes the slowest. Since I’ve been reading scientific literature recently, I’ve noticed how scientists persist, although they often fail, in seeking explanations for how the fundamental laws of our universe behave. In that spirit I pose a question to myself: By what mechanism is my lane always the slowest? I try to imagine how the law of traffic jams must work, specifically as it applies to Sunday traffic coming from the beach.
Say, all three lanes of westbound Rt. 50 are traveling stop and go on a Sunday afternoon.
My lane is creeping; the other two start moving smartly. Does some fundamental law behave such that if I get into the faster lane, I, too, will move along more quickly? Not in my case. I’ll scoot into the faster lane only to find that, within minutes, the lane slows down even more than the one I left. I’m back to zero. I try this a couple of times with the same result.
Might I do better by examining traffic behavior with the theories of quantum mechanics? I understand that one law of quantum mechanics states that both the observer and the observed are mutually changed by the act of observation. I take the thought a step further. If the lane I pick always winds up being the slowest, I may be the problem. That is, the lane that I’m not in will necessarily move along nicely because as soon as I try joining a faster lane, my interaction with it creates a new phenomenon; the lane slows down.
Do these phenomena suggest some universal significance? Perhaps it’s that we are not alone on this planet. That whatever we do impacts others in ways we can’t begin to imagine. And that others who have walked with us, even for a short time, may never know just how much they have influenced us.
It’s curious how things like that can happen.
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