The Absent-Minded Professor

It would seem, judging by topic of the stories with which my wife Kathy regaled family and friends over the Easter holiday, that I have become a stereotype. In particular, the absentminded professor. While it is true that I am a professor, and while it is equally true that I have moments of, uh, attentional elsewhereness, I had never placed those two facts together into an equation that yielded the answer “absentminded professor.” Well, given the misadventures in cognitive waywardness that Kathy so artfully brochured, that answer has become blindingly obvious. No longer could I casually dismiss my lapses with such benign phrases as “zoning out” or “drawing a blank.” No longer could I claim that I was beset with weighty thoughts or, should that prove ineffectual, as it usually did, take the opposite tack and say that, like a Zen master, I was practicing a consciousness-rinsing detachment. Were Kathy’s stories biblical, I would have been forced to concede their inerrancy. I was an absentminded professor.

Sure, I have long recognized my propensity for a kind of mental truancy—stepping into the shower with my glasses on; neglecting to add detergent when doing laundry or turning on the dryer without setting the heat; losing track of the day of the week and entering a classroom stunned to find no students present; forgetting to put on socks; putting some baby carrots in the filter basket of the Mr. Coffee machine; gazing off at some architectural feature in a room during meetings and being elbowed by the person next to me because I had not heard a question directed to me, carefully packing my warm winter mittens with their thinsulate liners in a shoebox so I could easily access them the following winter, only to forget where I had placed the box; forgetting my wedding anniversary and my granddaughter’s birthday despite writing the dates down in my appointment book, because I had somehow misplaced my appointment book. The boxed gloves and the appointment book have yet to be located. I’d be willing to wager that 3M need not go global: the copious pads of memory-aiding Post-It Notes I purchase—copious because they disappear with such mysterious regularity—would undoubtedly keep its domestic profits charts trending near vertically upward.

This all had seemed harmless enough. I paid little attention to my inattentiveness. Surely such eclipses of attention were common, and when I did think about them, I secretly harbored the notion that my particular moments of mental unmustering glittered with the luster of winning charm. But the events Kathy narrated, though told with loving jocularity, deglittered that lustrous bit of self-aggrandizement, made me attend my inattention, and sent me headlong into a bruising realization: I was a stereotype.

Story #1: Many years ago, early in our marriage, in those glorious days of pre-cell phone yesteryear, Kathy, out of town at a meeting, called home via a long-distance collect call. Here’s the transcript:
Operator: I have a collect call for Jerry DeNuccio from Kathy.
Me: Kathy who?
Kathy (in the background): Kathy your wife!
Me: Oh. Yes, operator, I’ll accept the call.
Kathy: Kathy who? What were you thinking?
Me (who wasn’t thinking and should have admitted it): Well, I know a couple of women named Kathy.
Kathy: And who might those other women be?

Clearly, I had entered treacherous terrain. Unlike the Red Queen, I could run, mentally anyway, as fast as I was able and I would still lose ground. Only one sensible option remained. I sent up a white flag and quit the field: “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”

Story #2: Kathy called home one morning and asked me to take an apple-cinnamon braid from the freezer, put it on a baking sheet, and let it sit out on the counter so it could rise. The braid was intended for an office party the next day. I did as I was instructed, except I did not take the braid out of the box. Needless to say, it rose only enough to fill the box with a gluey, amorphous blob that would undoubtedly sent Steve McQueen screaming from the room. When she asked how I could be so thoughtless, I replied, “Well, you didn’t tell me to take it out of the box.” “Jerry,” she said, “every week you make two loaves of whole wheat bread from scratch. You obviously understand that yeast products rise when they warm, right?” “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”

Story #3: This past winter I woke up about 1:30am, not untypical for me, and, while making coffee, noticed that the back door was slightly ajar. Kathy is very particular about locking that door before she goes to bed, and thinking she had forgotten, I locked it. I then worked out on the treadmill for an hour and hit the shower. As I was toweling off, I heard a thump against the bathroom window. I ignored it, thinking it was probably a bird somehow trapped under the awning and frantically flying about to escape. Two more thumps, more insistent than the first, followed. It suddenly dawned on me that the thumper was Kathy. I knew she was working late, but I thought I had seen her in bed when I got up. She had worked all night and well into early morning, arrived home at 3:00 wanting nothing more than to slip into a warm bed, and I had locked her out. She had called my cell phone and the landline, but being in the shower I hadn’t heard them ringing. Seeing lights on, she knew I was up, and began to fear that I had fallen down the stairs and was lying broken-boned at the bottom, unable to answer her phone calls. Wading through snow a foot deep, circling the house to peer in windows, she saw the bathroom light, heard the shower, knew I wasn’t heaped helplessly on the floor, and thumped.

I raised the window. “Kathy, is that you?” Her reply was icier than the night air: “Will you please unlock the door?” Once inside, her tone became decidedly hotter—so hot, I backed away, fearing I would be blistered by it. Why did I lock the door? I thought you forgot to. How could I think that? I thought you were in bed. Didn’t I remember she’d called to say she’d be late? I didn’t think you’d be working until 3am. Why didn’t I answer the phone? I didn’t hear it. On it went: she third-degreeing my actions and lack thereof, me defending them, stoutly, growing a bit angry myself, until, with a strobe-lit intensity, I suddenly imagined her, bone-tired, cold, beset by fear for my well being, and I knew I had done a stupid thing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I did a stupid thing. Really stupid. I’m sorry.” And she forgave me.

Calculating the sum of these three stories, factoring in the other incidents of mental driftiness, and reflecting on the total, I now see with unbanishable clarity that I am hewn from the stereotype stock made famous by Fred MacMurray’s Professor Brainard in the 1961 Disney movie, The Absent-Minded Professor. Brainard, a chemistry professor, forgets his own wedding, several times. I suspect on the night she was locked out Kathy would not have minded had I done the same. Still, Brainard has one saving grade: he invents flubber. Me? I simply am a flubber. And that is a self-recognition about as welcome as a severely abraded elbow. To redeem myself from space cadetery, I needed to deflub myself. I therefore made a mental note to purchase, the next day, first thing, Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Unfortunately, it slipped my mind. Perhaps I should have written that mental note down.