Lemon In My Eye
This is the title of the blog. It stands for more than lemon juice in my eye, it stands for all the incredibly stupid accidents I’ve had or incidents I created. I am not a graceful person! I also seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, quite often! I guess it all started with the ice cream truck.
When my nephew was going to marry my colleague, the pair I introduced, my niece, ( his sister) organized a nice little luncheon in Manhattan to welcome her to the family. We were sitting at a round table in a lovely restaurant. I remember 6 people at the table. The waiter had taken our drink order. Just water with lemon for me, as well as my soon to be niece. I can’t remember if anyone ordered anything special. We were looking through this menu, which was difficult to understand. I was working hard, trying to figure out how to order something. The waiter gave us plenty of time to choose and finally we signaled him that we were ready. He started with me. I know this is difficult to picture, but here we were all dressed up, in a swanky restaurant. There were many occupied tables but the conversations were all muted. I don’t remember if music was playing. As I turned to the waiter to give me order, my almost niece, who was sitting to my right, takes her slice of lemon to add to her water. Unfortunately for me, the stream of lemon juice from that very juicy piece of lemon squirted right into my eye! All I could do was say I’ll have………… and let out a scream as the lemon juice hit my eye! The whole restaurant got quiet, everyone was looking at me, my eye now dripping, as I tried so hard to order my food. My daughter sitting across from me could not stop laughing. She often laughs when I have one of my incidents, but this time she was hysterical. This in turn made everyone at the table laugh. The more they laughed the more my eye teared. The poor waiter looked like the scream unnerved him totally. It took 10 minutes for us to calm down. In the end, I enjoyed my salad.
I had another experience with my niece-in-law. It was meet your teacher night. Because we both lived quite a distance from the school, we brought a change of clothes and went out for dinner near the school. We timed it perfectly. We returned to the school took our change of clothes into the girl’s room.
I started to take off my shirt by crossing my arms over my body and pull the shirt off over my head. My hand slipped and dropped the fabric, but my hand kept going up with full force. I punched myself in the eye! Well it hit just below the eye itself and a welt started to form almost immediately. My niece came over to my stall and when I opened the door she broke into laughter. She ran to get me a cold towel but it was to no avail. We got dressed, I looked awful,but I had a job to do. The Principal came into the room when she heard peals of laughter. She took one look at my eye and backed out. After that night I had the reputation of being a comedian who also did hypnosis and occasionally taught her class.
Apparently it had no bearing on the school, they kept rehiring me every year.
More than anyone, I think my daughter was witness to many many of my escapades.
One summer we were upstate NY. There was some kind of shoe factory there and the prices were great. These were basically shoes you wore for comfort and with slacks, like Moccasins. Definitely not something I would wear to school.
I picked up 4 pairs of shoes, two for me and two for my daughter. I went back to where ever we were staying and had her try them on. They were too big so I took her back with me to exchange them. Walking into the store I couldn’t decide if I should say, “I’m here to return these, or to exchange these,” or maybe it was, “I was just here and bought these.” Out of nowhere, I tried to say something but all that came out was gibberish! I stopped, smiled held my finger to indicate, just wait a minute and started again. The second attempt was no better. I just couldn’t get the words out! I was so embarrassed. My daughter was almost on the floor laughing, I gave the boxes to her and refused to try to say anything more. The expression on the ladies face was priceless. I think she wasn’t sure if I was putting it on, or this was real. Even as I am typing these I am laughing at the spectacle I must have been. I still don’t understand exactly what happened!
One day, coming back from school, I had reached the cloverleaf exit on the parkway. My car decided to quit, I had no idea what was happening. I made it to the shoulder and turned off the engine. I was concentrating so hard on trying to find the cause of the problem that I had no idea, none whatsoever, that a cop had stopped behind me and walked over to the driver side window. I have no idea how long he stood there, but he knocked on the window. I was so startled that I screamed and my keys that were in my hand went flying into the back seat! I collected myself and opened the driver’s side door, hitting him as it opened. By the time I managed to extricate myself out of the car, the cop was trying so hard not to laugh. He helped me find the keys and he inserted them into the ignition and the damn car started right up! He left it running and asked if I lived nearby. I said yes. He told me to drive straight home or over to the mechanic I used. I swear, he was still laughing when I pulled away. The mechanic never found a problem with my car. I have no idea what had happened.
