Heroism, Grace, and Strawberry Socks

(This piece was written in 2000, approximately. That is about 3 lives and 3 careers ago, but I'm still clumsy. It is kinda my niche in life. )

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 It is hardly a secret that I am ... uhhh ... no ballerina.

Recently at my day job someone was nice enough to bring us a huge bag of hot fresh bagels from a popular local yuppie bagel bakery chain.

I chose a warm plump sliced sesame seed bagel, slathered it with heaps of strawberry cream cheese, and reassembled it into 32 fugzillion calorie sammich of warm happiness. I poured myself a cup of ...*ahem* ...Diet Pepsi (don't say it!)... and headed back to my desk. I was tingling with that sweet anticipation you get when you're about to taste a long-awaited favorite.

I settled into my chair. Holding toasted happiness between thumb and two fingers I raised it toward my face. Oh wonderful, warm, high-carb, way-high-fat, toroid of joy!  All went well until what should have been the last inch of its final journey. At a distance of a scant inch from my teeth some bizarre, tiny, spasmodic, unidentified event took place. My bagel, thus far docile and compliant, suffered a panic attack and decided to resist - violently.

Fortunately this adrenaline-pumped bakery item chose flight rather than fight. Unfortunately, I chose to pursue.

OK, so I'm kinda clumsy sometimes. Once in a while I drop stuff - but it ain't quite that simple and to say "I drop stuff" is kinda equivalent to saying "Elvis may have been careless with his medications". I compound the damage because I can't simply drop something, I always try to catch the damned thing. Despite years of evidence I apparently believe inside that I still may save it - and that this rescue mission is worth whatever immeasurable & embarassing gyrations ensue. Inside me is someone so blindly optimistic that 53 years of humiliating personal messes cannot discourage my attempt to acrobatically and self-sacrificially rescue 57 cents worth of milk in mid-spill.

The smart thing to do would be to retreat. When do I ever do the smart thing?  Every inch in the gap between me and a toppling bowl of spaghetti reduces the inevitable laundry-stain acreage by more than 11%. But no, far too gallant am I to flee the cry of some plummeting Greek yogurt in distress.

Of course I never actually rescue anything, just make the mess 16 times as big as it should have been. This is why my house features, among other intriguing decor, marinara stains 6 inches back inside the heating duct - the one near the ceiling.

The bagel jumped in terror and as is my apparent destiny I scrambled to the rescue, grabbing for it as it rolled, bounced, slid, and careened in the general direction of the floor. It resisted my efforts, brushing teasingly against my fingers, 3 times even bouncing up on the way down  just to mock me.

Part of this bagel’s strategy was to divide itself, apparently to confuse me. It worked. “Split up! He can’t catch BOTH OF US!”  In 20 years of The Learning Channel I'd never learned  about 'baglotic division' as a predator-avoidance technique.

Ten seconds later I was left defeated, with strawberry cream cheese carnage on:

-my beard
-my right cheek
-the palms and backs of both hands
-my bare right forearm
-the top and edge of my desk
-a pile of invoices
-the right leg of my jean shorts
-my bare right calf
-my right sock
and my right shoe...
while the bagel lay cream-cheese down panting and trembling on the filthy warehouse floor in two separate locations 4 meters apart.

It took me longer to clean up than it would have taken to eat the damned thing. I'll never get the pink stain out of my white sock.

There is good news, though. Rest assured that you are safe from this miscreant!  That uncooperative oven-spawn has been sentenced to hard time in a sealed Hefty, and currently awaiting transfer to Pima County landfill.

... then I still had to go back and get a bagel.