Beech Tree News Network

One night, while I was cooking dinner, I noticed the knife I was using had become really dull, so I went into where Garey keeps his hunting knife stuff and got one of those hand-held knife sharpeners.  (I long ago gave up on trying to attain the skill it takes to use a flint rock to sharpen anything.)  The knife sharpener I chose had four little grooves and a handle, so it was obvious where to put my fingers and thumb.  The V-shape with the flint on either side was also the obvious place for the knife.  It wasn’t obvious, however, which direction to pull or push the knife through the V-shape in order to sharpen it.
    Whatever my husband, Garey, was watching on TV, was evidently not as entertaining as watching me try to figure out how to use the knife sharpener, so he muted the sound and asked if he could help me. 
    “I don’t understand how to hold this thing,” I said.
    “Turn it around,” he said, from his position in the recliner.  I turned it around.
    “No the other way,” he said.  I turned it the other way.
    “Now, turn it toward you,” he instructed.
    At this point, the knife was still inserted between the V-shape, so when I turned the sharpener toward me, the knife was pointed at my throat.
    “No, point the knife the other way,” Garey said, with just a bit of alarm in his voice.  I pointed the knife away from me.
    “Now, sharpen,” he said.  I slid the sharpener down the knife blade.
    “Try sliding the knife through the sharpener instead of the sharpener down the blade,” he said, while shaking his head.
    “Now, you understand why I’ve always had so much trouble taking tests,” I said, returning to the kitchen, where I could sharpen my knife without an audience.
    Test-taking has always been a nightmare for me, mostly because I get confused with directions or because when I look at questions (other than math), I see multiple possible answers, and I don’t know which one to choose. 
    This summer, my granddaughter and I were working through some worksheets she brought home after graduating from kindergarten.  They were to prepare her for the first grade in the fall.  There was a section in which you had to put a series of time-lapse photos in order.  The one involving a mouse, a nut and a tree gave me fits.  It went like this: a mouse asleep in a hollowed-out tree, a mouse eating a nut, a mouse running toward the hollowed out tree. 
    I figured out pretty quickly that the mouse asleep in the tree was last, but I couldn’t decide which one was first.  Did the mouse eat the nut then decide he needed a place to sleep it off and remembered the hollow in the tree?  Or, did the mouse find the hollow tree, discover there was a nut inside, eat it and decide to take a nap afterwards?  In my opinion, it could have gone either way.
    When I was still living at home, my brother used to tell me, “Cheryl, you are so smart, but you don’t have no common sense.”  His words would infuriate me, but I understood what he meant.  I had trouble figuring out the simplest of things.
    Recently, my granddaughter had a homework sheet that instructed: Fill in the missing letters.  I kept trying to insert letters into the blank spaces that would spell words until I realized the work sheet wasn’t looking for words, it was just asking you to fill in the missing ABCs.  In my defense, the reason I thought the missing letters spelled words is because there were some extra-long spaces after some of the letters.  Consider the following: a_c___ef_hi____k_m.  See?  Doesn’t it look like the instructions expect you to form words with the missing letters? 
    If you have the kind of trouble I do with question/answer problems or techniques, there is a silver lining.  People like us think outside the box—actually, we have trouble even finding the box—and sometimes that can be a good thing.  We find answers to problems others might never have thought of.  Because our brains turn things around, upside down and sideways, we have the ability to make things fit; hence, we have very good organizational skills.  While others are running around chasing answers inside the box, we have put all the boxes in chronological order, and the world can always use a little more order.