This weekend I found myself digging through our trash in search for our checkbook....twice. On Saturday at 5pm I had my wife tear out a check so that I could pay for my dinner at Tim Coager's fundraiser in Owasso. Sometime between 5pm and 9pm the checkbook went missing. There was, on our part, a 99.9% certainty that the checkbook had never left the house, and about an 80% certainty on my wife's part that she had put it back in its place after she handed me my check.
So where was it? I tore the house apart looking for it, and couldn't find it. The next morning I asked the kids if they had seen it. A likely suspect was the 3-year-old, but as any parent with a 3-year-old knows, obtaining actionable intelligence from a toddler is next to impossible. He told me he had taken it, he assured me that he didn't know where it was, he told me that he knew what it looked like, and he told me that he didn't know what it looked like. It all just depended on how I asked the question.
The night before I had looked in the trash can, but avoided any real sifting of the trash. The next day, however, required more drastic measures as I had searched the likely spots for the checkbook at least 10 times. A second bag was retrieved and I transferred the contents of the trash from one to the other, once piece at a time. No dice...just stinky hands.
Instead of looking for places it should be, or places it might be, I transitioned to looking for it in places that it couldn't be, the impossible places in the house. I grabbed a flashlight and crawled around on my belly looking for it under things. I looked under the drawers under the premise that some how it had gotten pushed out and behind the cabinet. Theorizing that the errant book wanted to be in the trash but couldn't quite get there I looked next to the trash can, under the fridge. Not finding it there, I found my eyes looking at the oven, figuring I had nothing to lose I shined the light in-between the impossibly small gap between the oven and the floor. A silhouette with a striking similarity to the checkbook appeared, and my heart skipped a beat. I jumped up, moved the oven and there it was!
I went back to the 3-year-old and asked, "Did you put Mommy's check book under the oven?" He cocked his head ever so slightly, donned an incredibly charming but devious smile and said, "Yes!" Next time I'll check the oven before I check the trash...
1 comments:
HA!!! That's fabulous. Your discription of "actionable intelligence" was 100% accurate in regards to a 3 year old! You did NOT, however, mention other things you undoubtedly found (or, as I just recently heard a fellow Okie say, "nodoubtedly" found!)
Last Thanksgiving I helped my mother in law root through the the trash looking for a single utensil that did NOT end up being found, but in the process we found THREE thrown away forks from her very nice--and non-disposable--silverwear!
Sometimes I wonder if the things in the house pay dues to a House Stuff Union. Springing to mind is the scene in Toy Story 2 where one of the toys looks through the binoculars and sees Woody in the garage sale pile. "TWENTY FIVE CENTS?? C'mon, Woody! You're worth more than THAT!!"
Post a Comment