The Least Smart Things List, Example No. 1 (26)

The Least Smart Things List, Example No. 1

Over the years I’ve thought of making a list of “The Least Smart Things I’ve Done”, the things that wake me up in the middle of the night, that cause me to say, to no one in particular, “How stupid!”

Many things on this list couldn’t be published of course; Phyllis (my wife and caretaker) is the only person on the planet who is privy (oh, let’s find a better word than that) to many of The Least Smart Things I’ve Done, and she is, of course, sworn to secrecy.

The first Least Smart Thing that comes to mind—that I can talk about anyway--occurred shortly after Phyllis and I got married twenty years ago (the smartest thing I ever did). I early on ran into a new problem as my wife, a nurse and a very competent person, was used to pumping her own gas.

I had never done that as I had always gone to a full service place. I had a firm rule about my car: I never raised the hood, as one or two things, usually both, would happen: I would hurt myself or get dirty.

So I always patronized what used to be called service stations, which you may or may not remember depending on whether you are a mature (old) person like myself, or whether you are a youngster who is just this second learning that people haven’t always pumped their own gas.

But one evening early in our marriage, I decided my car needed gas. I had always been of the school that just because I was running on empty didn’t mean it was anything to get excited about. I might have waited a day or two in my previous life. There were always a couple of gallons of gas left in your tank, right? Phyllis thought my attitude was dangerously lax; if she had only half a tank she was refueling.

So that winter evening I planned to fill up so my little wife wouldn’t be worried about me being stranded six blocks from home. I congratulated myself for being so thoughtful. Then I made a fateful decision: I would give the full-service station a skip; I would just pull in and get my own darned gas.

It might have been wiser to have waited until daylight for this little experiment, because it would have been dangerous, even if I could have seen what I was doing. I boldly pulled in at Phyllis’s preferred filling station and tried to remember how she managed to pump her own gas. Nothing was coming to me.

Even so, I thought I might as well take the gas cap off—seemed like a good place to start. The next thing, obviously, was to grab hold of the pump (Step A) and begin to fill the tank (Step B). Somehow I never got to Step B.

The gas wouldn’t come out no matter how hard I squeezed the pump. “What to do?” I could have asked someone, but that would have been too embarrassing. I hadn’t actually pumped any gasoline; therefore, I didn’t owe anything. No one seemed to be watching-- I decided to make a run for it. I hightailed it out as though I had just watched American Graffiti and remembered an urgent date to race somebody on a two-lane road.

I drove to the other end of town to a full-service station. I asked the attendant to fill her up, which he proceeded to do.

He came back around shortly after he started and said. “Hey, what happened to your gas cap?”

I played it cool. Darned if I knew. I told the guy I would ask around to see if anyone might have seen it.

I then headed back to the self-serve station to find my missing gas cap. I searched all over the place, and soon drew a crowd, as people were curious why I was crawling around on the concrete.

“Just lost my gas cap”, I said. “Happens to people all the time, you know”. (The crowd parted after this rather strange claim.)

The bad news was I had to tell Phyllis when she got home from work that I had somehow lost my gas tank cap.

“You tried to get your own gas? And you drove home without a gas cap? You didn’t light up did you?”

“Not until I got back in the car”, I explained.

“It’s a wonder you didn’t blow yourself up. No more of this: I’ll get your gas from now on, Sweetheart”.

And so she has for over twenty years now. I haven’t lost any gas caps since. I guess I can scratch this one from my list of Least Smart Things I’ve Done, as it won’t come up again.

Now if I just knew what to do about the other 497 things.