Lost and Foundering

Take a look at the picture above and see if you can find the bag of Kirkland brand ground coffee . . . and now imagine that you are me: I took a look at that tableau on Saturday morning, could not find the coffee, proceeded to search the house high and low for a bag of caffeinated coffee-- the pantry, the downstairs shelves, the lazy susan in the lower cupboard, etc.-- and then surmised that we had no more coffee (and I wasn't going to wake my wife up to ask if we did) and so I angrily went to the grocery store to buy some . . . when my wife woke up and she heard my tale of woe, she immediately pointed to the blue bag of Kirkland brand ground coffee, and this threw my brain into a cognitive fit, until I rationalized and realized that I was standing to the right of the coffeemaker when I looked at the counter and rashly decided we were out of coffee, so the big bag of ground coffee was behind the coffeemaker . . . and it's impossible to see something if it's behind something else, or so I convinced myself; after I drank my coffee, I went to Home Depot and bought a tree, three bags of topsoil and a canister of deer repellent granules, and it was really windy, which made it difficult to push my orange flatbed cart through the parking lot, because the tree kept falling over, but I finally made it to the car, loaded the tree in the back on top of the bags of soil and then drove away, only to have my path blocked by a large white canister, rolling along across the pavement, blown by the strong wind-- so I got out of the car to move this random obstruction and it turned out to be the deer repellent I had purchased-- I had not noticed it had fallen off my cart-- the wind was obviously the culprit-- and I had apparently forgotten all about my purchase in the three minutes between the check-out line and the loading of the car . . . so I considered myself lucky, because the canister was for my wife, and if I came home with it unaccounted for-- when I had obviously purchased it (it was on the receipt) after the whole coffee fiasco, she might have wondered about my ability to live a fruitful and independent life without her support.