When My Mind Wanders It Brings Back Souvenirs

My wife often stares at me with deer-in-the-headlight looks and asks me to remind her again about whether or not she had a good reason to have married me nearly thirty-one years ago.

She claims that she wasn’t informed that I was crazy, at the time.

Personally, I think my tenuous grasp on reality is one of my more charming attributes.

After over a quarter century of marriage most wives have gotten pretty used to the way their husbands behave. I’d be afraid that might get boring. Diane will never get used to the way I behave. She’ll never know just what to expect next.

Quite frankly, I am never sure myself.

I’m not suggesting that I am prone do doing things that might give my wife a legal excuse to have me committed. I might push the envelope from time to time, but even I have my limits.

For example, I might walk naked into the bedroom from the bathroom, talking into an imaginary communicator saying, “OK, Scotty, I like a good joke as much as the next guy, but beam me down my clothes now!”

Eccentric...? Well, maybe a little, but it’s still not something she could have me committed for.

Now if I was to walk into the living room doing the same thing when her boss is over for a visit, that might be different.

I’m a pretty curious person when it comes to looking for new experiences. That curiosity gives Diane an excuse to bring out the aforementioned deer-in-the-headlights look on a fairly frequent basis. The other day we needed to use her car on an errand.

I don’t often get to enjoy the experience of sitting in the passenger seat. It was a nice day. The car windows were open. I started to think about how the dog behaves when she is in the car with her window open.

I decided to see what it felt like to stick my head out the window and let the wind make my cheeks flap. Diane obviously thought I had finally, once and for all, lost my mind.

Sure it was a bit on the unusual side, even for me, but I contend that it is a long way from insanity. If I had stuck my other cheeks out the window to see what it felt like to have them flap in the wind, I might agree that the time had come to have me fitted for a custom made straightjacket.

I try to employ one of my favorite eccentricities whenever I am taking money from a busy automated teller machine. When the money comes out of the machine I grab it, hold it over my head and shout, “I won! I won!”

I have a very good reason for doing this. We’ve all heard about people being robbed after making a withdrawal from one of those machines. I figure that any robber in his right mind would be afraid to try to mug somebody who is so crazy he thinks he hit a slot machine jackpot from a bank machine.

There is another side benefit to my behavior. Seeing the stunned looks on the faces of the other customers, the bank employees, and the armored truck deliverymen is just pure entertainment.

I have a tendency to respond to people’s questions in ways that are technically correct answers, but just not the sort of answer they were expecting. An example of this occurred recently when I stopped at a gas station in Kentucky to get a cold drink and a snack for the road.

The cashier looked up from his book, glanced at my small purchase, and asked, “You got gas?”

“No,” I replied, “just a little heartburn.”

He was able to do the deer-in-the-headlights look almost as well as my wife.