Non Sequitur: Parts 1 and 2

This column is a series of two non sequiturs. I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but how often do you actually get to say non sequitur? Anyway, I think it makes me sound intellectual.

Our building has a Friendsgiving dinner where everyone signs up on a list to bring a dish. It was my first time out and, of course, I managed to mess up the list.

In a moment of exuberance I had signed up for mashed potatoes, forgetting I was no longer in Oz or, rather, Syracuse, where my Kitchen Aid mixer with its large bowl and beaters resided, and where my two human potato peelers known as daughters who would come to help cook.

To be perfectly honest, it was my sister-in-law who actually made the mashed potatoes for a large group. And she passed away.

But that’s not my excuse.

I’m going with the lack of peelers. So I scratched mashed potatoes out on the list and wrote I would bring a vegetable instead.

Now I was committed to bringing a vegetable. I told the organizer I would check with the other people to be sure I didn’t duplicate. I mean, one green bean casserole is good, but three or four? And to atone for messing up the list, I offered to dress up as the vegetable I brought…or not.

After careful research I was now set to bring Brussels sprouts, but at the last minute I got very excited when I saw that the person who had previously signed up for sweet potatoes had crossed it out and switched to rolls, therefore leaving, what seemed to me at the time, sweet potatoes up for grabs. I figured I wouldn’t mess up the list anymore by writing on it as it was already the day before and the category looked wide open.

I know you are all hanging at the edge of your seats to see how this played out. So I won’t hold you in suspense any longer. I ran to the grocery, calling my sister-in-law, Stephanie, on the way to make sure I had the recipe right and bought four large cans of sweet potatoes, bags of marshmallows, sticks of butter and brown sugar…stuff I don’t normally keep in the house.

Then, disaster hit!

An hour before the dinner, when I happened to look at the list, I saw that, totally out of left field, someone else had already signed up for sweet potatoes. But by then it was too late. I had no time to switch once again. And forget the atoning outfit; there is no good way to dress up as a sweet potato casserole. Even the Brussels sprouts would have been a stretch. And as recrimination, their casserole was better than mine. Chopped nuts beat out marshmallows as a topping. I know there’s a lesson in all this and I just hope I learned it.

In another lesson learned category, I will now switch to body parts.

I made an appointment with an orthopedist as my left knee was really bothering me. The appointment was a month out, so I was being careful not to aggravate it while exercising and even started walking a little more slowly.  I had just taken up Pilates and, as that was the only new activity, I figured that I was doing something wrong that was causing the problem. Nope. The explanation is so stupid that I debated even writing about it, especially after the sweet potato debacle. But maybe I could help some other idiot out there — I mean fellow human.

As you know, I recently moved. My new kitchen has drawers on the bottom instead of doors and it’s where I keep the dishes and the pots and pans, things you use for every meal. Somehow I got in the habit of shutting the drawers with, you guessed it, pushing them with my left knee. Once that dawned on me, I also realized I was shutting the refrigerator door the same way. And the bathroom drawers.

If there are any other sore knees from hitting things out there, let’s form a support group for dummies.