Automatic Pilot

Yesterday a man opined on NPR that we humans are often not thoughtful, doing things by rote.  That resonates with me.  Sometimes it’s tragic, but most times (at least in my life), it’s absolutely comic, as in the other day.

When I pull into the church parking lot to make my way through towards my driveway, I will take my garage door opener (a luxury my church installed when I first came so I wouldn’t have to get out of the car to open the door in the snow) and click the button, timing my arrival at the garage with the slow opening of the door, born of well-practiced perfection – but not this day.

I hit the button, then hit it again, driving ever slower.  Nothing.  I pulled up to the garage still punching the button, now with increased pressure and fervor, as if I could will its working.

I thought many drats, thinking it was time to replace the battery.

And then I laughed – out loud.

I was sitting in front of my own garage, commanding with my genie device that the door open before me – the only problem: I was clicking on the garage door opener to my mother’s house.

Whimsically, I wondered whether my mother, 150 miles away, was wondering why her own garage door was opening and shutting, opening and shutting.

At least this time I finally became aware of my error.  Not always so, as in the time, some years ago, when I ‘lost’ my car.  At the end of the day, I went to the parking lot, but found no car.  I looked and looked, which was silly – it’s a pretty small lot.  No car.

In high dudgeon, I strode back to my office intent on calling the police to report my vehicle stolen.  Hearing my loud protests, a co-worker came out from his office to ask the problem.  When I told him that my car wasn’t in the lot and someone had obviously stolen it, he replied, I saw it earlier down at the court house.

Dead stop.  Then, red-faced with embarrassment, I had to admit that I had (out of my routine) driven straight to court that day and after, forgetting I had driven, had walked back to the office and at days’ end, gone to retrieve the car from its usual spot with no memory or thought of having parked somewhere else.

I could go on – like the time I took the side mirror off my car backing out of the garage because someone else had parked it the night before, a few inches to the left of my usual placement.  Or how my dog tried to fly one day (dogs are habit creatures too, you know) stepping out onto a stoop that wasn’t there, the workmen having not yet replaced it (they say dogs emulate their owners – although maybe it is me emulating the late, lamented Scruffy).

Routines are, I suppose, necessary things.  They keep me from having to reinvent the wheel every new day.  But I’m forced to confess that all too often, I live on automatic pilot until, every now and then, I’m brought up short and reminded that things are not always the same.

I just wish that those lessons didn’t leave me looking and acting the fool.