A traumatic course

Those of you who know me well also know that circumstances conspire against me often – just for a laugh, nothing sinister. I’m just watching these little episodes carefully. Their frequency hasn’t increased. If plotted on a temporal base, they should appear to be periodic events. Or so I console myself.

I was running late for a training course on understanding trauma. As it often happens to me, the final stretch of the road leading to my destination had some traffic issues. I reached at 1332 when the course was due to start at 1330. The parking lot was empty. Strange, it did occur to me. But I was already late and didn’t wait to ponder the reasons. The door to the venue was locked and no ringing of the bell or banging on the door produced any sign of life. Not a soul. A cemetery at midnight would be more lively (with all its resident souls). Whipping out my phone and finding the joining instructions, I discovered I was exactly one week too early.

On reaching home, I put my hand on my shirt pocket to retrieve my favourite pen. I, being a diligent student, always carry a notebook and pen to class. This pen is special, magical. I’m still trying to figure out how it works. It has red, blue and black selections plus a pencil. You hold the pen vertically, look at the colour you want and as if by telepathy, when you press down the button on top you get the colour you’re looking at! I bought it in George Town, Malaysia in 2023.

My pen was missing. Trauma. I pulled off my sweatshirt and discovered my pocket was missing as well. Thinking back .. while I was crawling in traffic, I had picked up the pen from the glovebox and put it in my pocket without remembering that the shirt I was wearing had no pocket. It stayed trapped between the pocketless shirt and sweatshirt until I got out and ran to the locked door of the training venue. It probably escaped as I was getting out of the car.

I didn’t have the heart to drive the 6 miles from home back to town but didn’t want to lose my pen either. Any other pen, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Come Monday it would be found and kept by some stranger. More trauma for me and the pen. This is when I realised I could delegate the job. My son was picking up my wife from the library in town that afternoon. They could easily swing by the training venue and look for it. This is what they did and found the pen lying forlorn and deserted in the lonely parking lot.

As the cliché goes, all is well that ends well. I have this strong feeling that it’s not going to end well for me in the final reckoning. But as long as I can remember enough to write a coherent story, I’m fine. Bring them on, I say, to the conspiring orchestrator of memory lapse events. The episodes that accompany them seem worth it, for now.