Thinks a Lot

My husband Jack once told me that I think too much. That accusation wasn’t apropos of nothing; it was a result of one of the myriad questions I’ve asked that just seem pointless to him. But I’m curious about so many things!

It drives him particularly crazy when we go to the movies. While I have no objection to suspending belief for the sake of a story, sometimes a plot element is just so contrived, or a mistake is so obvious, that I can’t stop myself from commenting “Come on, give me a break!” to which he invariably replies “It’s just a movie.” But I always want to know why someone somewhere didn’t catch the numerous stupid mistakes that are so commonplace in the movies nowadays. Am I the only one who thinks about these things?

Jack and I had a conversation about this. He said there are times, such as when he’s fishing, that he tries not to think about anything, to just make his mind a blank. That is such an amazing concept to me, the idea that your mind can be like a big white dry-erase board with nothing on it. We were on the road to Lubbock when we had this conversation, with lots of nothing to look at, so I decided to try for myself to just zone out and not think about anything at all. I looked out the window towards the horizon and tried to go blank. Right away I spied a house on the service road, in between an auto parts place and an appliance repair center, and I thought “Why on earth would anyone want to live right there?” and then “Well, maybe the people who live in the house own the businesses on either side, and they wouldn’t have far to go to work.”

Okay, start again, picture that blank board.

I looked out the other side of the car and saw acres upon acres of plowed fields, and thought “How long would it take to do all that in the old days without a tractor?”

Shoot. This blanking-out business is impossible.

Could it be a gender thing? Is the ability to “not think” the result of an enzyme or a protein or something like that on the Y chromosome? More than once Jack has come home to tell me that a co-worker had her baby, and I asked how much did it weigh, did everything go okay, and he looked at me blankly and said “I don’t know – I didn’t think to ask.”

I am acutely sensitive to cigarette and cigar smoke. At close contact, it causes my throat to close up and makes me miserable. Once Jack and a friend borrowed my car to go somewhere, and smoked big old smelly cigars the whole trip, and came home and parked the closed car in the driveway. The next morning I got in the car and was nearly knocked over from the stench. The smell had permeated every fiber of the upholstery. I couldn’t get away from it. I later said to Jack “You know how sick smoke makes me! That’s MY car! What were you THINKING?” He just looked at me blankly. Because, of course, he and his buddy hadn’t thought, not for one single second, about anything other than the desire to smoke cigars and enjoy themselves. They just hadn’t thought.

I sometimes think too much; he sometimes doesn’t think at all. After thirty-four years together, we balance each other.

I think.

(Dallas Morning News Neighbors 2-04-06)