SLIPPING MINDS AND SLIPPERY PILLS

This is "BIN," better known as Rich
Most of our senior friends and relatives are always concerned about losing things, misplacing things, forgetting things, etc. We all agree that the most perplexing thing is going into a room and standing in utter amazement, wondering why we are there and what we went into the room to retrieve. That’s not just a daily occurrence, it’s several times a day. We also talk about misplacing things that we just had in our hands several minutes ago.
On our recent trip to Texas we had a really good laugh at/with my brother-in-law Rich, who said he doesn’t mind me mentioning his name. I wanted to call him BIN for Brother-In-Law but he says he’s not modest and gave me permission to use his actual name. He doesn’t mind being laughed at.
When I went to the kitchen of their home, I heard Rich say, “I need to take my pills before we leave on our trip.” He went to the cabinet, took out his pills and vitamins, put them on the cabinet like we all do. There in plain view was the stack of his various pills to take.
I turned and went to the adjoining room. Suddenly I heard him say, “Where did my pills go? They were right here on the cabinet.“
Rich had mysteriously lost his pills on their journey from the cabinet to his mouth. I gave him a really hard time about that. How can you lose pills on their journey from the cabinet to your mouth? That’s nutty, not just a matter of senior-absent-mindedness.
“Maybe I threw them in the trash,” Rich remarked in disgust at himself. He went to the trash bin and searched all the way down to the bottom of the trash, which is never a pleasant task. No pills.
It was starting to get serious. He spoke about his mind slipping, like all of us can attest to who are over 60, but now his pills were also slipping into oblivion. He had not moved from the appointed place at the cabinet where he always takes his pills.
As I am laughing uncontrollably at Rich’s predicament, which he found to be not as funny as I did at this point, he is understandably totally confused because he had lost the pills somewhere between the cabinet and his mouth. How could this be? Was there a pill snatching fairy who exists to keep senior citizens on their toes wondering if they’re losing their minds?
The mystery was finally solved when Rich opened the drawer of the cabinet and saw the pills in a nice little stack next to the scissors, which he had used to open his over-the-counter antihistamine.
See, the pharmaceutical companies are in a conspiracy again. Not only do they make pill bottles that seniors cannot open, but they make over-the-counter pills in ridiculously encased cardboard sheets that we have to use scissors to separate a single pill from the cardboard instead of being able to easily push them out of the foiled top like we should be able to do. It’s impossible.
I know that the designers of those antihistamines are envisioning gently aging seniors citizens struggling with the packaging of over-the-counter pills, and they’re laughing at us. It’s, simply put, a conspiracy.
However, I don’t think there are many people who scoop up their pills and deposit them in the drawer with the scissors they just used on the difficult packaging.
Rich got our trip off to a good start as we talked a long time about his slipping mind and the slippery pills that ended up in the scissor drawer. That got us started on a good humor wave which lasted all day.
Rich was a good sport but I’ll always think of him as BIN (brother-in-law) who lost his pills on their journey from the cabinet to his mouth.