I hope you enjoy this real life conundrum
as much as I did.
Several days ago my wife looked up
from a newspaper cartoon in which two children were at a dining room table
eating something she did not recognize. Kindly treating me like her personal magic
answer book, she asked me what it was. I was confident that I knew but I
could not associate my belief with anything that I could put in front of her
and proudly state this is “a “ or this is “an”. The little girl demonstrated clearly
to her brother that you pull off the stem and then scrape the good stuff off with
your teeth and throw the rest away. The
little boy did it. He then said: “Wow Talk about your sneaky vegetables!”
Between giggles, I could clearly see it on the table between them and I
understood what the children were saying. But my mind could not access the file
which had the proper name for this vegetable. I searched high and low in my
mind and in a couple of books. Alas, it was gone and my personal frustration didn’t
help one darn bit. Time passed, as it always does, and this morning I saw an
object with a shape that reminded me of the shape of the object I could not
place and wonder of wonders, the answer to the question was
solved!
It was, of course, a relief but an even greater gift quickly followed. The finding was not as important as the gentle reminder that rarely do we really forget something we know or have heard or experienced. My laptop computer is a marvelous tool that sometimes functions slowly and incorrectly. When it malfunctions, I have found the best action is to turn it off and disconnect it from the power source. Wait a while and then turn it on and let it begin anew. The mind, like the machine, often cannot find what it is looking for, even those things which we profess to know. It is important for us to understand and appreciate the fact that sometimes our brain simply needs to be shut down and allowed to reset. For me, this is even more important than the finding of something lost.
It was, of course, a relief but an even greater gift quickly followed. The finding was not as important as the gentle reminder that rarely do we really forget something we know or have heard or experienced. My laptop computer is a marvelous tool that sometimes functions slowly and incorrectly. When it malfunctions, I have found the best action is to turn it off and disconnect it from the power source. Wait a while and then turn it on and let it begin anew. The mind, like the machine, often cannot find what it is looking for, even those things which we profess to know. It is important for us to understand and appreciate the fact that sometimes our brain simply needs to be shut down and allowed to reset. For me, this is even more important than the finding of something lost.
Question:
What is it that the children were eating?
Answer:
Be honest now. Did you already know it was “an” artichoke?
A
final question: How did you know?
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