Just three quick stories.
Tom Hanks in the bathroom
It is a normal eye itch, as far as I can tell, so I thoughtlessly give my right eye a quick poke-’n-swirl with an index finger. It’s the sort of thing where you know something is wrong right away. I can’t focus on anything nearby. I close my right eye (dominant, of course, like any good right-handed person would be), and notice how big everything seems to my left eye. Switch! Everything’s tiny, and hard to read (I’m picking up documents, trying to read them, to test my eyes, [not to continue working]).
I wiggle my eye in all conceivable directions. I can’t feel my contact anymore. I start looking on my finger (the one that did the itching), then on my shirt, my keyboard, all over the blue berber carpet… no noticeable plastic disc’ette that my good eye could see.
The strange thing is, I’ve left a pair of old contacts in a travel contact carrier in my work bag for more than a month - so I snag my small sample bottle of solution, the travel contact case, and I walk quickly to the bathroom.
There are three sinks, the one on the right being the most used and surrounded by used hand-washing splatter puddles. I choose the middle sink, which seems dry enough. I quickly set down my items and swing my hands beneath the faucet while the water popps on with a thump and swoosh. One squish of hand soap… better make it two; I’m sticking my fingers in my eye. Swish swish swish. More water. Shake twice into the sink. Walk over to the wall and swing my hands randomly in the air. Mechanical motor sound like a little remote-controlled car, and voila! My hands are clean and mostly dry. Paper towel in the trash can. Back to the mirror.
I can’t see anything in my eye (with no sense right now about the irony of such an endeavor). I take out the extra contact, rinse it with solution, set it on the tip of my finger carefully like a flower petal, and launch it more carefully into place. Blink blink. Feels fine. I can see again.
Grab the contact container - need to rinse it out (after all this time). I swing it towards the faucet- AH!-yankitbackoutlikethere’sasnakerightthere! Crap, that automatic faucet scares me. Woops.
Grab my stuff quickly, exit the bathroom (with one of those little tissues they have now right by the door to help me open it without touching the door itself… how dainty am I?).
Back to my cubicle. And work. Work work work. Normal normal normaaaallll - nope. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong in my right eye. I can feel it. And I can think of what it is. Blink some more. Yep, I feel it in there. For the first time ever, I have two contacts in one eye at the same time.
Reach in my bag, grab out solution and case, walk quickly to the bathroom.
Sinks are still open. Bathroom still empty. Good good. Everything starts all over again with hand washing and drying.
CRAP! Here comes someone. Normal guy I work with. Fine. I can still do this. He walks over to the urinal, right behind me, clearly visible in this large mirror. I pull my eyelids back and start poking around in my eye for contact number one.
Fountain-like sounds commence, like my neighbor is excited to aim directly in the part of the urinal that would excessively and needlessly make noise. I’m practically performing eye surgery and there is a stream of urine burning in my ears like a laser tearing through a forest of tree-trunks.
But there’s no end. My fingers are pushing and squeezing my eyeball and I have Tom Hanks in the bathroom with me, reliving his memorable scene from A League of Their Own. This man’s bladder must be like a party balloon!
Yes. One out. After a solid minute of pee sounds, I’ve extracted half of the contacts in my eye. And he doesn’t stop. So, back my fingers go, poking at the corner of my eye like a young child hugging a puppy, all this time with a lump of disgust forming in my throat and amazement filling the back of my mind like an empty 2-liter bottle on a long road trip.
Finally. Yes, I finish. And he slows, just a little. It feels like it’s been five minutes, but it’s likely only been… two. Okay, that could barely (and I mean barely) be an exaggeration. Yes, he’s finally done. I’m busy looking at the straight crease in my contact that allowed it to tuck itself behind my eye so deftly when my friend the fire-hydrant walks up to wash his hands (they must be deflated by now).
He just gives them the quickest of touches to the short spray of water before he’s already swinging his hands strangely in front of the wall and getting a few paper towels. Internally, if I’m not already totally troubled by the urinating session, I’m now utterly appalled by the fact (FACT!) that he didn’t (DIDN’T!) wash his hands.
I feel better about my dainty tissue door-holding habits.
Fearless Fawn
It was getting near to two in the morning when we pulled off of the highway onto the dirt road that leads up the hill to my in-law’s house out in rural wilds of west-central Minnesota. It had rained in a fury in the early evening, so the road was more like pebbly frosting than a crunchy instant breakfast powder. My brights were on, so we saw them right away.
And they were cute - two little twin fawns, complete with spots and stupidity. I kept it very slow (but I can’t stop because it is so muddy). I honked the pathetic little horn and one of them ran off into the brush like I thought any deer would do with the proper prodding. But the other one, well… he made us laugh.
My darling wife just wanted me to go around him (not that we’re positive it was a him, but we think of him as a him, so just picture him with little spots and big dark eyes and little stick legs, and dumb as a post), because he would run for a few feet and stop on one side of this little dirt road with enough space to pass by him. But I didn’t want little deer-skull dents in the car, or to put little Toyota-hood dents in the deer, either, so I would get a little closer and honk at him, and what did he do? Yes, as predicted and unwanted as possible, he would dart across the road, directly in front of me, and start running down the road like a eight-year-old stage-actor trying to prepare for Chariots of Fire.
It was at least a quarter mile from the highway to the top of the hill where we would be turning into the driveway, and for several minutes, we played a game of deer-chasing with the fearless fawn. Was he showing off? We will never know. But he was getting tired as we were getting to the top of the hill.
He would dart in front of me, run with a burst of speed, then trot for a little bit more, then pick one side of the road to stand by and act like he could finally run off into the underbrush. He faked us out time and time again. All the way to the top, and even made us think he was going to start running down the driveway when we turned to go down it. But we lost him.
I was convinced I would step out of the car and get rammed in the stomach by an angry mama-deer, but it never happened. It was a strange end to the night.
Secrets of God in (peanut butter) Cookie Crumbs
I could hear them on the other side of my cubicle talking about the cookies (and island bars) that had been left on a filing cabinet in a high-traffic area just a few feet away. The girls were discussing the fact that nobody knew where the treats came from, since it sounded like they did some extensive questioning of possible culprits in the area. They did admit they were very good.
And I could tell that just by walking by. There were only two island bars (something like an oatmeal sort of cookie crust with a sea of chocolate-chip chocolate and little bits of the cookie continents resting on top, if that helps complete the picture) and maybe four cookies left on two clear-plastic plates.
I walked back over to my cube a little bit later, and there were some random peanut butter cookie crumbs like dirty fingerprints right by my cubicle. I thought a bit about how God must feel. Listening in on the world where people like sunsets and sex and laughing and puppies, and even when nobody seems to know where it came from, maybe God feels a little like I did, bringing my wife’s cookies and island bars for everyone to enjoy. And it’s not like I was trying to hide the fact that I brought them. Not only were there crumbs by my cube, but I had walked in with the plates of treats in my hands. I seriously feel like I found one of the secrets of God in cookie crumbs. Maybe it’s not a story I can retell.