When Simple Things Become Impossible

Nothing is worse than when simple things become impossible. Take something as simple as trimming your fingernails.

You look in the medicine cabinet for a nail clippers but don’t find one there.

You check the reservoir for medicine cabinet overflow, the top drawer of the vanity.

No luck again.

You search all the drawers in the vanity because the other drawers are reservoirs for the overflow from the top drawer.

You strike out there too.

After rummaging through the linen closet, you get an idea. Hmmmm, maybe you will find one among all the clutter on the sink. So you shuffle things that have not been shuffled since the Nixon Administration.

Nope.

All you want is a freak’n nail-clippers. Is that so much to ask? Trimming nails is a simple thing to do, why has it become so impossible?

Now you are angry. You methodically remove everything from the medicine cabinet and arrange it carefully on the floor so you can prove to yourself the clippers are not there.

You then do the same to the linen closet and after that proves fruitless, you follow through with the sink.

Alas, all the work may have demonstrated your resolve – but it did not yield a nail-clippers.

Slowly, like a specter emerging from the mist, a vague recollection rises through the fog of your uncaffeinated mind. There might be one on the stove. It sounds crazy – but the recollection grows stronger. You definitely remember a nail clippers hiding behind a back burner.

You check the stove. You find a screwdriver, a can of silicone spray and the spare keys to your car (so that’s where they went) but no nail clippers.

Why can’t you find a set? You own at least sixty of them. After every trip to the drug-store, you come home with at least one set of clippers floating around the bottom of the shopping bag. You buy them so frequently that whenever you forget to pick up a pair, the clerk chews you out. How come you can’t find them now?

Oh well. You sneak into the only place in the house that is guaranteed to contain a nail-clipper. The trouble is, it is also the only place in the house you are not allowed to go: your wife’s bathroom. So you tip-toe carefully least you alert her…

CREAK!. Her squeaky bathroom door rats you out. She has been pleading with you for months to fix it. Now your procrastination has finally caught up with you.

“Get out of there!” she yells from down the hall.

“I need to borrow a nail-clippers….”

“No, you cannot use mine,” she cries, “you must have at least sixty of your own.”

“I just want to snip a hang-nail, it’s nothing gross.”

“NO!” she says.

“But darling, we share all kinds of intimacies, why can’t you let me use your nail-clippers?”

“Because you lose them. If you want to find yours, check the window sill in the garage.”

Gosh, you hadn’t thought of that.

Sure enough, there on the sill is fifty of your sixty pairs.

When you come back into the house, your wife asks, “Did you put them back in the medicine cabinet where they belong?”

“No,” you say, “I left them on the window sill because now I will remember where they are.”

“That is what you said the last fifty times.”

Like you believe her? Anyway, if you could only find your trusty can of silicone spray you could take care of that snitch of a bathroom door…. but where did you put it?