Saturday night Cathy, Tommy, Evan and I decided to grab a bite to eat. And we treated ourselves to a restaurant. As we are being seated my eyes fall upon the grill that the restaurant is giving away and I drift over to it to fill out the marketing information registration as the rest of the crew move on. "It’s Doug!" I look up to see Thing 1 and Thing 2 and a nice couple, obviously their parents. Look away! Don’t make eye contact. Blast this facial/name recognition deficiency of mine. Wait. You have to look at their faces to recognize them otherwise its just bodies in clothes. Clothes! Look for clues. Well, Thing 1 and Thing 2. Pretty big clues! Tall guy. They know me. Where’s my help? Panic! Look at grill. No look for Cathy. Eh. The restaurant is a cloud of blurry people. Looks like I’m staring at the prison train from The Wall. Eeks. No help there. Clues? A theatre reference on the shirt! Thing 1, Thing 2. Suessical! It’s the Barrys!
Whew! Takes a lot of words to recall 5 seconds of one’s life. I don’t know if it is the stress of worrying that if you don’t immediately recognize someone that you will offend them or if it was all that beerdamage I did to my brain in college or if its the stress of my life in general or if I just am incapable but regardless of how well I know you there are simply times where I stare at your face and no name will come to me!
I really like seeing our online friend’s in the real world. It is nice to pretend that I have friends in the flesh for the people who read Reality Me probably know me better than people in real life and the readers probably interact with me more than people in real life. I really stay locked in the basement A LOT! We need human contact! Granted, Scouting and some of the other activities of the children have brought us out of our hermitation a bit of late. And that’s nice. Of course, I wanted to bug the Barry’s and be social but Cathy in her ever present since of prudence would not let me interrupt their dinner although I sneaked in a "good-bye" and "break a leg" despite Cathy’s protests. Barry and family, it was great seeing you guys!
It was a real treat seeing you too – and it was actually my wife who recognized you before I did, so I have some recognition difficulties as well.
You would have been welcome to come by and shoot the breeze at the table any time 🙂