As I entered our den with a handful of corn chips in a loose napkin, Julie quickly looked up, eyeing me suspiciously. I like to snack on chips while reading, but bringing in the entire bag would give license to eating all of the chips in one sitting—probably not a healthy choice. Hence, the handful of chips.
“Don’t make crumbs now!” said Julie.
“I don’t make crumbs,” I replied.
“Well, where do all the crumbs on the floor come from?”
“I think you might be the crumb maker. Why do we assume it’s automatically me?”
“There’s nothing to assume darling. When I moved your leather recliner the other day, guess what I found underneath? Broken corn and potato chips that had been lying there for who knows how long.” And from there she followed with a wide-eyed look directly at the floor and then back at me.
“Well, I guess you’ve got me on this one.” Then, trying to salvage my dignity, I said, “But you know, sometimes you sit on the recliner.”
“Oh, don’t even try to go there mister.” And so, I quietly sat down with my book and chips, recalling that Julie was not the first to point out that sometimes, for whatever reason, I have a tendency to be unaware that certain of my actions may have effects on my immediate surroundings. I take that as a sign of intelligent introspection, but I could be wrong.
There have been similar situations. Back in the 1990s I had a small office at the Forbes Biological Station located along Quiver Creek at the Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge. During lunchtime, I enjoyed taking short walks in the woods, usually finding a nice place to sit beneath a tree. One of my favorite walks was following the creek to where it emptied into Quiver Lake. That was low-lying ground, though, and sometimes it could get muddy. During one of those times, the Illinois River had just gone down from a flood, probably a day or two earlier, so the ground was soft and wet, a situation that I did not discover until my feet began to sink. The creek bottoms not being a good place for hiking that day, I returned to the levee road and then, after a while, sadly walked back to the office.
I was sitting at my desk staring at the computer when the director appeared at the office doorway saying, “Uh…Tom…you tracked mud all over the floor.”
“How do you know it was me?” I defensively asked.
“Well…the mud clods on the floor lead right to your office.” I then looked down and saw a small pile of mud under my desk and an undeniable trail leading to where the director stood.
“Oh…sorry,” I said. “I’ll clean it up.”
“Yes,” the director replied, shaking his head as he walked away. Thinking about this, I could see that Julie knows me only too well, predicting when she saw me enter the den with chips that there was a good chance I would leave crumbs on the chair and then on the floor.
Back in high school, one of my friends, Jeff, was already out of school. He worked full time and had saved enough money to buy a brand new 1975 Chevy Camaro. Jeff was very proud of his new car. He kept it showroom clean, and tried never to park it near another vehicle. Of course, he wanted to show off the car to his friends, but it was obvious that he was nervous about taking it out on the busy streets of the Chicago area. But when you’re around twenty years old, driving around town in a car full of friends is what you do.
Jeff’s Camaro still had the “new car smell” when I was invited to be part of the group tooling around town. “Ah, smell that new car smell,” he would say while taking in a deep breath; like the tiny bits of rubber sticking out of new tires, it was part of the magic and aura of being the first owner of a new automobile. One doesn’t purchase a new car very often, especially at his age, so he was due this small indulgence without ridicule.
Probably no one knows how long the new car smell might last; but one day it is gone, and the car becomes just another used car. But before such a development could naturally happen on its own, there was an incident. Jeff, two others, and I had just piled back into the car, probably after eating at Burger King, when a different kind of smell hit us like a freight train.
“What the…,” screamed Jeff. “I smell dog shit! Who stepped in dog shit? Tom?”
“Hey, why are you looking at me?” I said in defense.
“Okay, everybody out. Check your shoes.”
All four of us then frantically hopped around next to the car attempting to inspect the bottoms of our shoes. Unfortunately, what I discovered was a dirty brown, glue-like, putty-like substance solidly embedded in between the deep treads on one of my hiking shoes. “Okay,” I finally said with exaggerated remorse. “It’s me.”
“I knew it! Well, clean it off,” said Jeff. “You’re not getting back in this car with stinking dog shit on your shoes. And make sure you didn’t get any on the carpeting.” Looking up at the sky, he added, “Damn! He gets into my new car with dog shit on his shoes.” The other guys were no less sympathetic.
“Sorry,” I offered, “I guess that just about does it for the new car smell.”
Getting my shoes clean was another matter. I scrounged around and found a stick that I used to get most of it off, but getting all of it out from the grooves and corners of the shoe bottom was impossible. To Jeff’s credit, he didn’t force me to walk home, and we stayed friends, but all the way home the car retained its new smell, and probably for some time after. From that day forward, though, I don’t think he ever failed to ask me to check my shoes before getting into his car or home.
In the final analysis, I think what some might see as a person oblivious to his surroundings, I see as a person not distracted by unimportant details. It’s related to a basic human survival strategy that has been honed over millions of years. How else, for example, could a man within the chaos of a running herd of herbivores, on the African savannas, run a spear through a selected individual in the herd, at a vulnerable place in the body no less, and succeed in the attempt? That same intensive focus might be applied during a timed mathematics examination, where one has to imagine the details of the problem at hand in the abstract while translating the relevant unknowns into complex equations. How would Einstein have deduced the structure of the Universe if he had been unable to focus on his thought experiments, if he had been more concerned with not making crumbs or minutely examining the ground before taking a single step? Now, are crumbs really that important, in a relative sense?
The author during a walk on the Illinois River bottomlands.