Look What I Found In My Garage

Joel Goldman's Levolor blindThere’s an old saying that real life is more interesting than anything we can make up. I don’t know whether that’s true, and I hope that it isn’t because if it were, I’d have to switch from writing mysteries to writing non-fiction and I’m not ready for the tell-all memoir.

That said, there are some real life mysteries that I puzzle over from time to time, including The Migratory Habits of Inanimate Objects. When confronted by clothing, books, magazines or other inanimate household objects that are out of place, I do not disturb them. Instead, I observe them in their natural environment, waiting for them to evolve and find their way home. It worked for Darwin. It should work for me.

Case in point. We have a garage. The garage has a window. There is a Levolor blind on the window. My wife likes the blind to be closed. One day last fall, I opened it. It wouldn’t close. Or, to be more accurate, I couldn’t get it to close. This was not a surprise. When I was in elementary school, we took aptitude tests that included a section titled “Works Well With His Hands”. My results came back “Has No Hands”. So I did what any self-respecting, handless husband would do and bought a replacement Levolor blind and called my go to guys, Jeff and Steve , who serve as my handy man hands, and asked them to drop by and install the new blind. It took Steve approximately three seconds to untangle the cord that was preventing the blind from closing and close it. When I explained to my wife how I had so cleverly fixed the garage blind she said, “Yeah, right. Tell Jeff and Steve thanks and don’t forget to return the new blind”.

Levolor blind Jeff and Steve stopped by the other morning to fix something else that didn’t need fixing. When they were done not fixing it, Steve asked why the new Levolor blind was still on the floor in the garage. I explained my research project and that I was waiting to see if the Levolor would, like the swallows that return to Capistrano, do the job for me. Jeff nodded, saying that his son, who had recently moved into his own apartment, was conducting similar research and was waiting for a bunch of his stuff to migrate from Jeff’s house to his new digs.

One of the great things about scientific research is that collaborating with fellow researchers can lead to new discoveries as when Steve explained The Reproductive Habits Of Inanimate Objects, noting that while his kid’s stuff also refuses to migrate, it does spontaneously reproduce faster than rabbits.

I wasn’t discouraged when it took ten years to get my first book published and I refuse to throw in the towel just because my unused Levolor blind isn’t ready to leave the nest. Perhaps things will be different in the spring when the weather warms up.


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