Last week I forgot about the sprinkler and left it running for a half-hour longer than necessary. I’d set a timer on my watch, and I remember pressing ‘stop’ when my phone and wrist vibrated in unison. Then I returned to whatever it was I was doing, thinking Oh, I’ll finish this first, it’ll only take a minute... But soon it slipped my mind entirely, which is becoming a tiresome habit.
I realized my error after walking past a window and seeing the sprinkler in action. After shutting it off I told Crankenstein of my folly and said something like “Keep an eye out for that and pester me about it, it’s wasteful and shouldn’t happen again.” She nodded and replied “OK,” probably absorbed in something else and not completely registering what I said.
Surely you can sense where this is going: I forgot about the sprinkler again on Sunday or Monday night, this time for close to five hours while absorbed in writing. I noticed by accident, when I glanced out a front window before going upstairs for the night. There was a puddle on the sidewalk but it hadn’t rained. The location told me all I needed to know and I muttered an expletive or two as I shuffled to the door.
The sprinkler had saturated the lower half of the yard and the runoff collected in the patio’s drain, which is connected to an underground pipe that runs along the side of the house and discharges to daylight (obscured by landscaping) partway through the front yard. From there the water follows a gentle slope to the sidewalk and, in sufficient volume, streams to a storm drain a short distance down the street.
Again I’d dismissed a reminder, certain I’d remember to take care of something I almost immediately forgot. But this time Crankenstein could’ve alerted me: she’d been outside in the backyard, almost directly in front of the sprinkler, at least twice in the span of several hours, standing there for however long it took Muriel to relieve herself. When I asked her about it, she shrugged. Of course she’d noticed it, she said, but she figured I wanted it on.
“I wanted it on for five hours?!” I asked.
She gave no indication she understood how crazy that was.
“Do you know how long a sprinkler’s supposed to run?”
She didn’t and wasn’t interested in learning.
It devolved into an argument because, as I pointed out, I’d immediately alerted her to the first oversight, not only so she had that information (in case it’s useful later on) but because she could easily help prevent it from happening again. Had she known that sprinkler timers exist, she would’ve told me to buy one. But a timer only solves one problem; it can’t make her listen or be more present, and it can’t persuade her to care enough about the basic upkeep of our home to ask “Hey, did you know the sprinkler’s been on longer than Shoah?”
When I pressed the matter and wondered “Do you even remember our first conversation about this?”, she got defensive.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were that forgetful. I didn’t know things had declined so much that you require supervision,” she snapped.
It was the wrong tactic to take with me when she requires far more supervision herself: whether it’s the eating disorder, her depression, or ‘Niles’ running amok, there’s always something to look out for. Beyond that, Crankenstein and ‘Niles’ shouldn’t endlessly fret about my neurogenderative disease (as she calls it; I prefer movement disorder) and the future of my cognitive abilities and then feign ignorance about exactly the sort of uncharacteristic forgetfulness that sparked those very fears.
Anyone can forget about a sprinkler while immersed in something else — especially when they seldom use it — so I wouldn’t assign any importance to it just yet. My problem seems to be more with distractibility than actual memory, and the best way to adapt for now is to stop dismissing alerts and telling myself “I’ll take care of that next.” As frustrating as it is to interrupt yourself in order to complete a second task, it’s preferable to letting important things slide.
Annoyingly (or amusingly), Crankenstein will forget all about this kerfuffle within the next two weeks. Though I know how stupid and inconsequential it sounds — who cares about a sprinkler? — this is the sort of thing that makes the future feel almost unbearably hopeless to me when I imagine worst-case Parkinson’s scenarios, particularly when coupled with all the equally heavy business of Surprise, Surprise. Despite that, our bickering concluded with a few jokes about our mutual stupidity, the way it usually does, more (sprinkler) water under the marital bridge.