Enviromental Awareness

Some of us walk obliviously through our worlds.

These people are not deficient necessarily, it’s just that they don’t pay much attention to their immediate surroundings. Walls have a tendency to leap up and smack these otherwise occupied folks and often, they can trip repeatedly over the same permanent fixtures in their homes.  Is it too much to ask to extend awareness of our bodies beyond our immediate skins?

This morning, my 75 year-old dad backed out his driveway INTO my husband’s Prius, which was parked right next to his Volvo.

The door is fine, but the passenger fender is dented and twisted, with the little plastic “hybrid” sign almost entirely obliterated: only the “brid” bit still exists and I have in it my pocket now. 

At first I was pissed - couldn’t he LOOK where he was backing up? Then I remembered, with empathy, backing into someone’s car as I shot out of the garage, and I decided to give my dad less of the frosty grumpy treatment. The pissed off returned when I realized my dad had oblivioulsy WALKED by MY car into order to get into HIS wrecking machine. He didn’t notice for reasons that remain obscure to me.  Perhaps he was lost in thought, or maybe he wasn’t aware of my little gold car because he didn’t expect it to be there and he was operating on automatic. 

Or maybe he just need to take his head out of his butt.

Last evening, my ten year-old daughter was in the shower and while bending to retrieve fallen soap, gashed her head on the sticking-out soap dish.  She started screaming, I dashed over, saw the blood all over her forehead, grabbed a washcloth to press on her head, and scooped her up. Fortunately, it wasn’t bad - scalp wounds are gushers - and a few hours of ice reduced swelling and pain. 

Thing is, she MUST have seen the soap dish, must have noticed it protruding from the wall when she took the soap OUT of it, but when she went to stand, she had forgotten about it.  SHE says the soap dish jumped out and bit her. 

My little spaz has a tender scalp, but is fine and has promised up and down to OPEN her bloody eyes, to stop bumping to doorways and walls, and to occasionally notice potential dangers in her enviroment.

As for my dad… well, I am planning on needling him with this little bit of expensive dumbassery for the rest of forever.