Sunday, May 31, 2015

Need To Know

My wife and I met in the bathroom a few nights ago. It was notable because it is a community gathering place of sorts for our family. It is where the toothbrushes are, after all, and since dental hygiene is such a priority in our clan you can almost guarantee that one will cross paths with at least one or maybe even two of the other members. It is where we catch up on the day's events, or plot future plans for world domination, or what we need at the grocery store. Sometimes in all the rush and bustle that ablutions entail, we forget or hurry past those most important pieces of information: Don't forget that controlling continents gives you reinforcements at the end of a turn, and that we need granola.
When the nexus of the bathroom won't provide us with adequate connection for the news of the day, there are always the ubiquitous post-its. Sometimes it helps to have a post-it to remind one another to refer to the post-it that is located just out of the regular day's path. The volume of information at our house has increased over the past few years to the extent that we found it necessary to turn one whole door into a white board, allowing us to maintain grocery lists and reminders of upcoming events. The volume of telephone calls that come through our landline for somebody other than me has made this vast vertical surface a godsend, as all I need to do is stroll over to the door and scribble a note to those parties whose parties need to remind them of the party that will be held in their honor. It's an advance I would recommend to CNN, once they get tired of their holograms.
Then there are those messages that don't carry the kind of import as say, a Blue Letter. How are you? I love you. I miss you. Let's do lunch. Sometimes these get lost in the flurry of the day and we have no specific mechanism for tracking them. Which is a shame, since they seem vital to the continuing function of all that business that is written down and transcribed on lists or recorded for posterity. I suppose I should remain grateful for those late-night rendezvous at the bathroom sink. Which reminds me: Are we out of toothpaste?

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