Goines On: Perplexed

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Goines overheard someone questioning his focus in life, opining that his focus might not be advantageous and that he focused overmuch on his immediate thoughts because he was suffering from nearsightednss.
    Though a bit chagrined by that opinion, he had been furnished painful evidence the day before that he might really need to focus even more carefully on his immediate thoughts, that his supposed nearsightedness might be more a form of nearmindedness, of a failure to perceive what should be obvious. Disadvantageous focus indeed!
    He reviewed what happened on Sunday: Because clocks had sprung forward an hour during the night, rousing the Goineses up an hour early by the sun, he decided to clean the new bird feeder, since the birds were still on sun time and for them it was an hour earlier than his clocks. They knew not to expect him yet.
    He had been putting off the cleaning for several days anyway, even though the sunflower seed debris in the bottom of the plastic tube was green-moldy.
    To clean it thoroughly (why bother otherwise than thoroughly?), he had to disassemble the feeder’s parts, which he had done successfully one time before, even though the reassembly hadn’t been easy.
    To make a long story short – because he really didn’t want to re-experience the whole sorry episode – he had tried fruitlessly for about half an hour to install the pair of top perches by inserting them inside the tube and wrestling their protruding parts to stick out their openings. He was doing the top pair first because doing the bottom pair first would have made an obstacle of them.
    He hadn’t removed the top pair the other time he’d cleaned the feeder, so he hadn’t encountered this problem. Installing the bottom pair from inside had been challenging, but possible, because he had been able to squeeze the bottom of the tube into an oval, enabling him to get the “butts” of the two perches aligned so he could insert and tighten the screw that held them together.
    But this time, trying to distort the middle of the tube sufficiently to align the pair of top perches had for half an hour proven itself seemingly impossible!
    Fortunately, Mrs. Goines joined him to try to help. She quickly observed, “They [both pairs of perches] should be pushed in from the outside, not from the inside.”
    Seeing that, Goines was then able easily, in less than 10 minutes, to install both pairs of perches!
    For Goines, the point – the crux – of the matter was: How did he get the idea that the perches should be installed from the inside? The other time he cleaned the feeder, he had managed to reinstall the pair of bottom perches from the inside in about 20 minutes. However wrong that way was, it had been possible, and, in his mind, that had “confirmed” that it was the right way. Of course, as Mrs. Goines had pointed out, it was a snap to install the perches from the outside – clearly the right “right way.”
    But why had he installed the bottom perches from the inside that first time? Well, when he had unscrewed the screw that held them together, he “saw” them fall from the inside, didn’t he? But how could he possibly have thought that? If the feeder came with the perches installed from the outside, they could not possibly have fallen from the inside!
    Why hadn’t he noticed the first time that the top perches were from the outside when he was installing the bottom perches from the inside? And why hadn’t he noticed it every time he held the bird feeder in his hands and replenished the tube? Was he indeed “blind” in some serious sense? Did he not really look?
    Goines scratched his head, figuratively if not literally (he didn’t want to contaminate himself with whatever bird bacteria might have transferred themselves to his fingers). The answers to these troubling questions deserved more focus on his immediate thinking. Like, where was the skepticism he was so proud of when it came to being skeptical of himself, of his own assumptions, judgments, perceptions, nearmindedness?
    The question whether he could or couldn’t focus on bigger issues in life was valid, though. Could he? Could he, for example, focus on where to stay, what to do on the Goineses’ planned travels in Europe this year? Sure, why not? Okay, what about that madman Putin killing people in the Ukraine? Goines felt himself fully capable of recognizing that their travel plans were looking iffier and iffier by the day.
    Could he think about what the United States and Germany and other European countries might be going to do to push back? He did wonder what they might be planning to do to eliminate Putin. He felt sure that eliminating Putin must be a topmost item on their agendas.
    But, as had been his lifelong practice, he wasn’t going to think long or hard about all that, simply because there was so little practical value in doing so. It wasn’t Goines’ job; he didn’t have to earn his pay doing that. And he never would have to. His only job in all of this, as far as it went, was to listen to his wife’s opinions about the matter and express his own sense of this or that, however laymanishly seat-of-the-pants it might be.

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