White Lineage, Personal Planners, and Shoe Racks – Thoughts from July 21, 2024

Yesterday, I was coming into work, and I saw a personalized license plate on a white Ford truck in front of me. I stared at it and figured out the weird combination of letters. It could only be one thing. I couldn’t think of anything else it could be. The license was as close to “white lineage” as you could get away with at the DMV. All the signs were there. There were several bumper stickers that I couldn’t understand, but one of them was for a speedway. Of course, these white racists were into race cars. Who else but white racists would be into racing? I told Patti about it when I got to work. The exact racist phrase wasn’t coming to me, but I sent myself a note in the car to remind me. I spelled it out for her from what I remembered. She said, “I think it actually means white lightning.” I was silent for a moment. My mind was turning from rage to embarrassment. Eventually, I said, “Well, they’re still not good people.”

Today, I was thinking about my lack of planning skills. Patti has planned all our vacations. People ask me about the places we’re going to and how much things cost. If Patti didn’t tell me specifically what things will cost (and she never does), I have only vague guesses. It’s hard enough to make my own doctor’s appointments. Writing down details is one of my worst skills. I make chicken scratches on a piece of paper that even I have a tough time reading afterward. Every phone call I’ve ever had only holds a vague memory for me. I’m good at noticing everything but what I’m supposed to be focusing on.

The one job that I never could have done well was being a personal assistant. They would have fired me halfway through my first day. As soon as I can afford a personal assistant for myself, my life is going to go much smoother. I can create things until the cows wear pink bunny slippers to their home planet, but planning how to get cows into slippers would have to be done by someone else. My skills are in writing, acting, music, or building. I need a manager to tell me when and where to do those things. Patti is the closest person I have to help me with planning my creations and managing them, but she is not interested in planning anything beyond vacations.

I recently built a shoe rack for Patti’s tennis shoes. Getting new and adorable shoes has been her recent obsession. It was kind of a collaboration. All the math, cutting, and screwing were up to me. I had a new cordless drill that came in handy that Patti gave me for my birthday. She told me what she wanted and supplied me with the wood to build it. If I had been in on the choice of wood, I would have gotten much flatter and less heavy wood. The wood she got was 1 ½ inches thick. The thickness of the wood became a factor in the width of the space it was going. It made the area to put the shoes smaller than the two pairs she wanted on each row. You could get three shoes across, but the fourth shoe would have to be above another shoe. The four rows, when fully put together, weighed as much as a small safe. In the end, she’s happy with her shoe rack. Happy wife, happy … something else. I can’t remember.