Sock it to me

Kyle and I are ALWAYS in a hurry, mainly because his sense of time is like my sense of direction, except worse. I can find my way around if a map's handy, but Kyle apparently never learned how to tell time. I credit this deficiency to two factors:

1. He used to simultaneously play and broadcast his own football games in his backyard, himself playing I guess 23 characters, thereby developing a world of his own in which he created generous time restraints, which in turn were probably influenced by No. 2:

2. His best friend as a young-youngster was literally his dog. And dogs operate on a different timetable from us humans. This is a very confusing timetable, mind you, because I Googled "dog years," and Wikipedia gave me some sort of graph that hasn't helped me figure out Kyle. This is unfortunate, because I don't know why when I say this: "Hey Kyle, we need to leave for X in EIGHT MINUTES." He translates it to: "Wow, that's enough time to shave, shower, dry a load of laundry and play hide-and-go-seek with the DOG." But Kyle obviously can't live up to this warp-speed mentality even though he THINKS he can, so we're about 52 minutes late to everything because my powers of persuasion don't work on those who are operating under the canine influence.

Combine this false sense of reality with a crazy-good ability to misplace things, and we're now about, oh, 90 minutes late to everything.

Like Monday. We're already, you guessed it, running a little late, and Kyle needs his cleats for his softball game.

"They're not in my truck [where they stay permanently]," he says. "I just looked. Where ARE they?!!!"

"They should be in your truck. That's where they stay permanently," I comment.

"They're not in there," he yells with his fists in the air. "I DISTINCTLY remember bringing them into the house, and thinking that that was a dumb idea, and then not paying attention to where I set them down."

I poke around the closet for a moment and then sneak outdoors, where I see that the cleats are nestled on the truck's floorboard.

I return indoors to tell him as much. "Do you have some socks?"

"They're in the truck," he says. "I just now put them in there when I was looking for the shoes."

OK. So I head back to the truck in good faith, trying to be a doting and supportive wife who trusts her husband's word above any other.

"Oops! I DISTINCTLY remember putting them RIGHT HERE," he points to the console and scurries into our yellow house to retrieve a different pair of socks from the ones he had previously planned to take. The others, at this point, are apparently still MIA.

I had forgotten about the lost socks till we got home that night and I glanced upward while heading for the bathroom:



That is where he stuck his socks. Wedged between the bathroom and the cat's bedroom, 1.5 feet below the ceiling. It is an absentmindness that's characteristic of a special breed. Maybe it isn't as bad as wrapping one's keys in painter's tape and tossing them into the woods, but at least I'm not alone.