Anna M. Aquino

While spending time with my family, I was reminded of an old story.   I had turned 16 and I was trying to pass my driver’s license test.   It would eventually take me four times to pass but that is another story.   I was excited and I wanted to do something nice for the family minivan, and wanted to thank my parents for letting me drive the minivan.     I decided I was going to wax the van.   The whole story seems innocent enough at this point.   Except I have to confess I don’t think I’d ever really waxed a vehicle much at this point in my life and had only really every seen my dad wax his motorcycle on sunny Sunday afternoons.   I could have asked what the right kind of wax was, but of course I did not.   I reached for where I knew my dad kept his motorcycle wax.   What I grabbed wasn’t normal car wax.   What I grabbed was something called “Blue Corral”.   This wax was meant to only wax things by inch squares because...

Last week I was making my lunch, and I grabbed what I thought was a hardboiled egg. I suppose this is when I add that after I had hardboiled half the carton of eggs Dan had asked me how he was supposed to tell them apart, and I had said, “Duh, the hardboiled ones are on this side of the carton, and most of them have a ‘B’ on them." To which I know he was trying to question my judgment because he was right you couldn’t really tell them apart but I was the one that got burnt on this point. So here I was last week, grabbing an egg to go with my lunch and I was completely unsuspecting that the egg wasn’t cooked, and it was perhaps if wisdom and observation had taken a back seat in my head. I mean really, they all looked just alike. Perhaps if I had been more observant I would have found something different about them, but from the outside I couldn’t tell the difference. It was as if I was stuck on automatic pilot as I cracked that egg over my cutting board. But in an instan...