What I've Learned

I enjoy learning and writing about my new-found knowledge. Some things I learn, however, are not worthy of a column. They illustrate how dim I am and would be embarrassing to share.

Here's an example.

At night, I walk over to the bed, take my slippers off, and climb in for the night. This has been an adequate procedure. I don't need my slippers until morning, at which time the light will be turned on and I can see them.

A few years ago, my bladder began, as it does in men of a certain age, to wake me up in the middle of the night and suggest I take it to the bathroom.

Not wanting to disturb my wife, I don't turn on the light, but sit on the side of the bed and gently and quietly feel around with my feet for my slippers, which, of course, are aimed the wrong way. My bladder often grows impatient as I locate my slippers (flip flops, actually) and get them turned around.

Recently, it occurred to me that if I sit down on the bed, then take my slippers off, they would be in the right place and aimed in the right direction for my midnight excursion.

There's no way I'd write about that.

Or this:

When the tooth paste is nearly gone, it's a struggle to convince the last smidgeons to gather at the top so they can be squeezed out. At such moments I think about buying one of those plastic keys you slide over the tube so it can be wound up, forcing the contents upward. When in a store, though, I always forget.

It's like the man who had a hole in his roof. It rained and all his stuff got wet.

"Why didn't you patch the hole?" a friend asked.

"Couldn't," the man said. "It was raining."

"Why didn't you fix it the next day?"

"Didn't need to then. Wasn't leaking any more."

Recently, I read how to get the last of the toothpaste out of a tube without a plastic key. Lay the tube on the counter and run the length of the tube, starting at its bottom, firmly over the counter's edge. Presto: any remaining paste is forced neatly to the top.

I'm happy to learn tricks like that, but it bugs me that I went so many years without knowing them. And they are not something I'd write about.

Did you know that brushing your teeth, spitting into the sink, and turning the water on to wash away your spit is the wrong order of things? To my joy, amazement, and dismay, I learned that you should turn the water on, then spit into the swirling water.

This eliminates having to rub at the stubborn bits of paste that cling to the porcelain and refuse to be washed off when you do it the other way.

Since I'm sharing bathroom trivia of a personal nature, I'll confess that at night I do my bathroom business with one eye closed.

Keeping one eye closed when the bathroom light is turned on preserves the night vision in that eye. When I'm done and turn off the light, I open the eye that had remained closed and can see well enough to get back to bed.

I might write a column about night vision and how on patrol at night in the military, closing one eye before being exposed to light is a useful technique. Say you are hiding from, but observing an on-coming vehicle or bypassing an isolated building that has an outside light.

Closing one eye allows you to still see, but keeps the rhodopsin in the closed eye from being bleached out by the light. Otherwise, molecules of rhodopsin in the rods of both eyes would change shape as they absorb light and leave you blind for 20 minutes while they re-adjust to the dark.

I might write a column about that, but not about going to the bathroom one-eyed, for then you might think me silly.