I have seen the future and it involves shoes with velcro fasteners. Well, okay, maybe I'll be able to get by with slip ons....but, really. I'm now worried I may live to see the day I won't be able to tie my shoes.

Not that I was ever very good at shoe tying anyway. I mean I've been ABLE to tie my shoes for years. I think you had to be able to do that in order to start kindergarten, and Dad was heavily invested in getting me to do it since I was already learning how to read. Or maybe he was just heavily invested in getting me to tie my shoes since he was sick of having to bend over to tie them....

Or maybe it was just one of those things that he had in his mind that I ought to be able to do by the time I was four.

But the point is that it took me a really long time to learn. Dad had to show me about 20 times and then I had to practice with this great big shoe at the Hess shoe store in Reisterstown.

I always liked that shoe store. I never liked shoes, even the slip on kind, both before and after I was able to tie the laces, because my feet have these really high arches and are wide and a funny shape so almost nothing ever fits them....and they were always that way, even when my choices were various types of Stride Rite.

Still, a lot of the shoe boxes had bassett hounds on them, and there were often little bassett hound premiums displayed throughout the store, the salesmen were always pleasant, probably because my mother never complained about the cost of shoes. Mom had worked in retail for a long time, and had a great deal of respect for decent shoes. She also instilled in my brother and me a great deal of respect for shoe salesmen. Like I said, she'd been in retail a long time. So we might have been fairly active, but we were never rude and we didn't trash the place.

The reason why I was thinking about all of this today was because I had to put the balloons out again. Last week I was saved by the fact that the helium tank was empty. Today, though I got the bright idea that maybe I could just tie the ribbon around the bottom of the blown up balloon before it comes off of the helium nozzle. It struck me that if the ribbon was tied tightly enough it would be as effective as tying off the bottom of the balloon, only it would be easier, since the ribbon would be a lot easier to work with than the latex.

Okay. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Actually, I think it was a good idea. The only trouble was that I had just gotten done putting 250 stamps on 250 post cards and then sorting them all by zip code, which I think sort of shot my wad for manual dexterity for the day. While my hands used to be really very strong before I started demylinating, I never had very good manual dexterity. My handwriting, as a kid, was almost completely unreadable too and it was only by dint of practicing for some stupid penmanship contest that I never submitted the entry for in time that I stopped getting points off and "Unsatisfactories". So far no real cure for procrastination.

But, I digress.

Anyway, this procedure lead to a great deal of balloon carnage, as they either got overfilled and popped, sounding like gunfire in the closed confines of the sales office laundry room ("Sales woman down!" I thought after the third time this happened.) Or else I wasn't able to pull tight the knot in time and at one point was running down the hallway after a balloon escaping while also making a rude noise.

It was really depressing to have such trouble tying knots. But at least I was able to get it done. And nobody has to know about it. Well. Except you.