"What's That Thing Hanging Out of Your Nose?" and Other Stupid Questions
by Maggie Van Ostrand
I'm one of those people who thinks of the perfect thing I should have
said long after the occasion has passed. An old friend acknowledged
my problem with the observation, "You're not quick, but you're
thorough."
O.k., so my mom was wrong when she taught us that
wisdom comes with age. She forgot the word "usually." I have never run
out of stupid things to say since I was little nor have I learned to
vibe out a calm verbal maturity now that I'm grown up. Grown tall is
not necessarily grown up. Such an emotionally mature future isn’t
always in the cards, like the time I ran into a man I haven't seen
since his wife passed away after a long illness.
What, I wondered as he approached, is the right thing to say to someone you used to be close to but haven’t seen in several years?
I knew it was a stupid question even as it slipped out of my face and I
heard myself saying, “So how’s your late wife feeling?”
Long after his startled look and quick departure, I realized I
should've simply apologized for failing to keep in touch. Or asked what
he’s been up to these days. Or the thing really sane people say,
"How’s it going?" Any of those greetings would have been appropriate
but no, I didn't think of any of them at the time I needed something to
say that was slightly less demented.
Sure it’s funny now. But
it’s so typical of the gaffes made by regular people who don’t have
scriptwriters coming up with the perfect thing to say on every
occasion. Why can’t somebody write a book: Verbal Fakery: Prepared
Improvisations For People Who Don't Think Fast Enough.
Waiting on line for the bus, I tried to be friendly to a pregnant lady
standing behind me. “When is the baby due?” I asked. She frowned and
said, “What baby?” Turned out she wasn’t pregnant, just overweight.
I thought I'd learned a lesson from that bus-line experience but a few
months later, trying to be thoughtful and complimentary to an
acquaintance whose belly preceded the rest of her by five minutes, I
said, “You carry small.” “What do you mean?” she shot back, “I’m not
pregnant!” I went home to FaceBook and unfriended her before she could
do it to me.
Then there was the time I asked the passenger in
the next seat on a flight from Paris to New York where she had bought
"that beautiful lace pantyhose." Turned out the woman was French and
was wearing ordinary pantyhose over unshaved legs. It was humiliating
sitting next to her for the rest of the long trip. I can only hope it
wasn't Carla Bruni.
To a lovely elderly woman who had just told
me she had trouble remembering things, I asked, “ So what is it you
can't remember?" She might have used a Voodoo doll for revenge because
now I have days where I can't remember what it was I was trying to
remember.
One gaffe really irritated a lady in the supermarket
whose gynormous shopping basket containing her twins took up the entire
aisle. I wanted to be friendly so she’d allow me to squeeze past, and I
said, “They’re adorable. How do you tell them apart?” She retorted,
“one’s a girl and one’s a boy.” Oh.
Every time I think I'm the
only person in the entire world who asks stupid questions, I remember
what is probably the most stupid question ever asked: "Where'd you lose
it?"
###
|
