Archive for the ‘Obsession’ tag
Aren’t You Going to Put That Away?
A few years ago, my wife Debbie and I were at a dinner party at her parents’ house. I was standing near my favorite spot, a chair in the corner of the living room next to the piano. I had tucked into a plate of hors d’oeuvres, absent-mindedly munching some shrimp while I eavesdropped on the pleasantries being exchanged in the dining room. I hadn’t noticed Debbie’s sister Laura standing next to me when she said, “Oh my God, Matt, look at your plate!”
I looked down at the smeared cocktail sauce and shrimp tail shrapnel and told Laura that I didn’t notice anything strange. “Look at the way you lined up the tails,” she said. “Did you do that on purpose?”
The shrimp tails were arranged around the rim of my paper plate with precision that would make a German automobile engineer proud. The half-dozen pieces were lying together, each one touching the next, turned on their sides in the same direction so that the curves interlocked. The chewed off ends faced the center, lined up in a semicircle matching the rim of the plate. The hard tailfins pointed outward toward the edge of the plate with their flaps dovetailed together. I said I was just playing with my food and pretended to laugh it off, while all Debbie could say was, “You are so strange.” I was embarrassed. I hadn’t realized I was doing it.