There a name for what I've been experiencing recently, it's sort of like cognitive dissonance, but not exactly. There is an element of time-shifting in there somewhere and just a hint some kind of hole- in-the-memory disease. The first instance was about two weeks ago, we had a weekend guest.
It's good to have weekend guests every now and then, they show you things about your life and home you never suspected. For instance, we do not have a tea kettle. Not one anywhere, not in the cupboards, not even in the completely impossible to get to space above the refrigerator. No, no tea kettle, we make hot water in the microwave. When told that, weekend guest has mild cognitive dissonance of her own, " In the microwave? (shock) ... I'll use a pan."
Also, the bathroom door sticks, that was sort of a surprise to me. I go through that bathroom door three, sometimes four times a day, only after weekend guest is long gone do I start to notice how much it sticks, but luckily for me, as the days have gone by, I notice it less and less. By the time the next weekend guest arrives I'll be completely surprised again.
(that is unless L gets her way with the bathroom make-over in the meantime.)
(What do you mean by meantime? Nothing.)
Then there was the subway problem. We are in Upper Manhattan, Hudson Heights, Washington Heights, there are a bunch of names. The A is the way to and from this locale and visitors to our little nest love the fact that they can hop on a train just steps from our steps. Until the weekend the weekend guest came. Then there was this:
That last word is either upMirs or upstairs... There are, of course, NO STAIRS to go up to get the M4 bus, as if one of those would ever arrive in time to get you down to mid-town before it was time to start thinking about dinner.
The task becomes explaining the MTA to the out of towner. This is the hole-in-the-brain part: I know what I would do to get around the 'no trains' problem, but my brain refuses to explain it to me so that I can explain it to her. We decide that taking a car to 168th Street would be best, but that has it's hidden problems. Well, they weren't hidden before but now that they are seeing the light of day, they must have been hidden before. For example, when you call for a car, the guy on the phone talks in Spanish to someone else for a minute or two before he says anything to you and then it's in Spanish too. You say your address and "I need a car" or "Yo quiero un auto." if you are showing off which is dangerous because then the guy thinks you can really speak Spanish and he says something that you haven't any chance of understanding. Usually he's saying how long it will be before the car arrives.
"One minutes."
Okay.
This is bad because now you have only ten seconds to explain to the weekend guest that she has forty seconds to get in the elevator and get out front of the building AND that the car has no meter like a taxi, the driver just tells you how much after you get there AND that she is going to 168th and Broadway where she will look for the Subway entrance and take a Downtown A or C depending upon if the C is running or if the A is running local.
What are the signs of too much information? Do the eyes widen or narrow or both?
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The second shifting experience happened a couple of days ago when I was addressing the condolence cards to my cousins. You remember the last of the aunts had sent me the addresses. On the back of the cards, --yes, each address was on a separate 3X5 card--, were the names of my cousin's children. That's a good thing for me, I pretend to be the family's genealogist, but I am not very organized. Anyway, the last time I saw any of these cousins was almost fifty years ago. The youngest was a toddler. The oldest was staying at our house while he tried and failed at working on the nearby tobacco farms. The middle child I scanse remember trying to fly a boxkite his father brought to our diamond.
Now I took a quick look at the back of the cards and saw that the toddler cousin was having a baby. That's nice, a baby. But aren't they getting a little old for babies?, my brain inquired. Well, maybe, yeah... a little. The other parts of my brain kept offering images of the cousin from fifty years ago--sitting at the table, standing by their dad's car, us waving to them as they left. I looked at the card again. The toddler cousin wasn't having the baby, the toddler cousin's baby was having a baby.
My mind swam in that for a minute or two. The toddler is a grandmother. Taxis have no meters. Take the stairs without using the stairs. If the express is local take the local. When did this door start sticking at the top and bottom? Como usta usted?
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