Blog 1656, 12 October 2018, Friday
Dear friend,
The move back to America in 2010 was cultural leap. In this electronic age, years flip by too fast. Electronically speaking, we were gone twelve years but were twenty years behind common trends in America when we returned. We learned the rudiments, kept simpler phones, stuck with cable TV, and have slowly tried to catch up. One of our recent, large steps happened two weeks ago when we bought a $10 “Square,” that physical phone app that enables you to receive payments from someone else’s credit card. As we helped collect money for an operating budget (inadvertent pun there—the operating budget and the medical operating fees) for The Plaster House, we enabled people to use their credit cards if they wanted to contribute money.
As might be expected, the “Square” didn’t work on Jean’s G-3 phone, but did on the phone of a volunteer. We only used it three times. After the event in downtown Seattle, we moved to Barbee Mill on Lake Washington but were not willing to use the device on an unsecured web site. This last Tuesday when we moved toward Olympia for our third and final The Plaster House event, we couldn’t find the “Square.” We asked everyone who’d helped us, we speculated how it might have gotten thrown away. (“Did you throw away a dental floss container lately?” I asked Jean.) No one knew, most hadn’t even seen it when we used it.
Last night getting ready to travel to Minnesota, Jean went into our travel drawer and shrieked, “Marvin, did you find it and put it in my drawer.” “Huh?” I asked in complete innocence, not knowing what she was talking about. It seems that some elf had hidden the “Square” in the drawer where Jean keeps her little electronic stuff. She has zero recollection of doing that very logical thing. If she’d been asked to testify in a court of law where she was expected to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” she’d have committed perjury. Even after finding it, she has zero memory of putting it there. She did it.
It shakes us a little, to have no recollection of having done something. Maybe it’s a sign of her aging, however if that’s true then I’ve been aging for seventy-some years because I’m always doing that. We used to joke that if Jean misplaced something we could find it by being logical (it should have worked this time, too), but with me logic never helped. So, Jean found what she thought she lost. She had a very Marvin-esque moment. She had asked everyone we worked with about the “Square.” All were concerned but no one had any idea where it went. We found it. In the future we’ll trust ourselves a little less. There was joy and sorrow in finding the “Square.” The last line of this blog should be something like “Life is …” but I can’t decide which of the million apt words should go next. We’re well. Love,
Jeannmarv
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