Signs

Recently, my friends said there was a cool bar near their house with a fun, speakeasy vibe. We all walked over there, my friends, my husband, and I, and it was a gorgeous evening.

We reached the bar, and there was a sign, about three feet tall, posted at the open door. To get past the sign, you had to squeeze by it. The sign said the bar was full, and we needed to wait.

Out of the five of us, three walked straight past the sign and into the bar. Two of us, myself included, called after them, "The sign said they're full."

Inside, the three who did not see the sign were in an active conversation with the bar tenders about where to sit. Ultimately, it ended with us being able to sit at open table and many apologies about several people not seeing the sign.

Except my husband, who was one of the three who did not abide by the sign, wasn't actively apologizing. He is a notorious non-sign seer. He informed the table of this.

We used to live by this restaurant which billed itself a saloon. It was in the heart of the desert, and it had an appropriate desert saloon decor, meaning it was crammed with Western cowboy stuff/rotting desert trash/and other generally weird things, like an occasional leg lamp or cactus.

Once, at the saloon, we made it to the hostess stand, and my husband barreled past and sat at an empty table.

He had blown by a sign that said Please wait to be seated and a hostess who had tried to tell him that he needed to stop. I watched all of this with a bit of horror, but mostly curiosity, while the hostess chased him down and demanded he go back to the sign and wait.

We then waited for ten minutes before she sat us at the same table my husband had originally sat at. Beyond the power games we had unwillingly entered, my husband's comment was, "With all this junk all over the place," he motioned to several rusted road signs affixed to the walls, "how am I supposed to know which signs are real?"

Which isn't a totally illogical argument, except that the shot up Cocoa-Cola sign probably isn't equal to the sign that says Please wait to be seated posted by a hostess stand. My husband's comment was that the hostess stand blended into the saddles mounted to stools.

And this argument always reminds me of that meme. The one that says the husband can't find the item on the shelf right in front of him, but he can see an elk on a hillside five hundred yards away.

And then yesterday my husband sent me a photo.

Can you see the elk in this photo?

It was a photo he'd taken from the side of a mountain. The photo was a bunch of trees several hundred yards away.

I responded that I could not. And predictably, he sent me a second photo, a zoomed in segment of the original photo of an elk eating some grass.

If it were a hillside of hostess signs though, all he'd see would be trees.

I guess this is what they mean when they say teamwork makes the dream work. Between the two of us, we can see everything from seven-hundred pound animals to 8" X 11" pieces of paper.

Our bases are covered.