Stay in Your Own Context!

I’ve been thinking about it a lot this weekend, and I am going to have to ask everyone to please, stay in your own context from now on.

I suppose I should explain.

I’m pretty bad at remembering names, and oftentimes I will recognize someone’s face but I’ll have trouble remembering why I know a person. And it can be embarrassing when I see someone and they say hello to me by name, and I can’t quite figure out why I know this person.

Just such a thing happened to me this weekend when I took my daughter, what’s-her-face, to her Girl Scouts meeting. As soon as I got there, one of the other moms said hi to me, and I knew I knew her, but I couldn’t immediately place her. So I wandered away from her pretty quickly, as though I had just remembered an important appointment at the other end of the Girl Scout room. Once I finally realized who it was, I went back over and had a semi-intelligent conversation with her. But still.

The problem was that she is a friend of a friend, and under normal situations I would only see her in the presence of our mutual friends. I wouldn’t expect to see her at Girl Scouts. So seeing her out of context was horribly confusing to me, and she probably sensed that I had no idea who she was until after I had given it some serious thought.

So from now on, I am asking everyone to please, for heaven’s sake, stay within your own context. If you are a friend of a friend, please always be sure to stay within an arm’s length of the mutual friend. That way I’ll have a visual reference to trigger my brain into knowing who you are.

If you belong to our church, and I only know you from there, please never leave the sanctuary. If I see you in the grocery store, that will undoubtedly confuse me, and I’ll probably have to hide out in the cheese department until I figure out who the heck you are.

If I normally talk to you at my daughter’s school while I’m picking her up at the end of the day, I’m going to have to ask that you always remain in front of the school, 24-7. If you’re an old acquaintance from high school, you’re just going to have to stay put at our reunion until our next gathering.

There are some cases where you can feel free to travel from one place to another. For example, if you go to our church AND I see you when I pick my daughter up from school, feel free to travel between church and the school since I know you in either context. But you may not stop at the gas station in between church and school, and you'll need to have heavily tinted windows on your car.

If for some bizarre reason you can’t stay in your proper context all the time, at the very least please buy a shirt that explains your regular context so I can recognize it when I see it. For example, a shirt that says, “Hi Hank! My daughter is on your daughter’s softball team!” would work pretty well. Or, “You have been my husband for 17 years!” That would be good, too.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.