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| The glasses in question. If you find them, drop me an email |
I've worn glasses since grade school, but these days, without blackboards to stare at, I only wear my glasses when I am driving. And then, only because I don't want to risk flunking the driving test. I prefer seeing the world in soft focus. I keep my glasses on the desk in the great room, where they are handy whenever I want to take the car out for a spin.
Right. Stage set.
One afternoon this past February we decided to, I believe, pick up some Valentine cards for the grandkids at the Dollar Tree three blocks away. Which we did, and then stopped at the supermarket to pick up some groceries. When I got back into the car, I realized I wasn't wearing my glasses, as I should've been, seeing that I was doing the driving. As unlikely as it seemed, I thought perhaps they had fallen off my face when I was bagging the groceries, so I retraced my steps back through the parking lot to the store and the checkout counter, without encountering my glasses. My wife was unhelpful, as she could not say whether or not I had them on when I left the house. I guess when you've been around someone for the better part of 50 years, you don't need to pay all that much attention to details like that.
Well, I thought, maybe I didn't put them on this time. Though I would've thought I'd have noticed the omission with the stoplights being a little blurry. But I hadn't. And, arriving home, I found that little sleeve on the desk where I keep my glasses was empty.
We had a mystery.
Subsequently, I searched the car, the house, and several days later, went back to both stores to ask if my glasses had turned up. They hadn't. Though, interestingly enough, the supermarket had a drawer of abandoned glasses... Two months later they still have not shown up, even after the almost infallible method of having them turn up - I went and bought a new pair.
It seems to me that classic science can explain this mystery in only three ways.
1, For some reason I took my glasses off in either store, and set them down, only to forget them. I didn't just hold them in my hand, or put them in my jacket pocket, I set them down somewhere for something and forgot I did so a minute later. I can not imagine why I would do this.
2. They just fell off my face and I didn't notice it. Now, they were loose enough to fall off my face if I carelessly looked down, but not to notice it... Well, unless I'm more ga-ga than I think - and you are free to think otherwise - I can't imagine this happening.
3 The only other solution is that I used them from some other purpose around the house, put them down somewhere, forgot about it, and they simply haven't shown up yet.
All three possibilities seem very unlikely, so unlikely in fact, that they rival far less conventional explanations.
As I briefly mentioned last week, the normal world we know is based on the statistical likelihood of quantum particles behaving in a predictable manner, but not all of them do so. Just most of them. Most do this, but there are always those that do that. It seems to me that over the billions of years of quantum particles doing this and that, that some of those unlikely "thats" would persist and play a role in our reality. The fact that they would be rare enough not to be scientifically reproducible does not preclude their existence. They might be considered "bugs" in the "matrix" if you will. I'm talking about incidents like people disappearing, or appearing out of the blue, time-slips, ghosts, and apparitions, i.e. things that science scoffs at as supernatural nonsense, if only because they, one, can't be explained by science as we currently understand it, and two, they are so rare and fleeting that they can't be studied.
The thing is that I think most people during their lifetimes have had experiences that they cannot explain. Little things. Things seen or felt that seemed somehow out of place in their everyday life. I suspect that if you ask anyone, they will tell you some event that they experienced that they can't explain.
In my case, I think something like this is a 4th possible explanation for the disappearance of my glasses. A little slip or flaw in the reality of world. A little bug that erased my glasses at some point during that shopping trip in such a way that I never realized they existed. Until getting into the car at the supermarket. Now, this is only the 4th possible explanation, and I'm not saying it is the explanation, mind you, only that it seems not all that less unlikely than the first three.
A 5th explanation is that my wife hid them as part of a cunning plan to drive me around the bend so that she can run off with some secret lover with my money. It might work. If it's even necessary.
I'd like to say time will tell. But I don't think it will.
