As they say in the military: Check your targets!

I have an unfortunate tendency to get myself into uncomfortable situations on a more or less regular basis. This is generally caused by my positively negligent inattention to detail, childishly trusting nature, and inability to pay attention to anything (other than the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue) for any length of time.

This theory was proved over the recent holiday weekend.

The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and I went to visit the kids and grand kids, who were camping near Silver Lake dunes. They had set up camp in a campground (I use the term “campground” only because it costs money to enter. If it were free, the media would refer to it as a “refugee center” and the Peace Corps would send in volunteers) near the lakeshore.

Tents, campers, cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, barking dogs, screaming children, adults and teenagers were “camped” together like eight ounces of sardines in a six-ounce tin. In order to inhale, you first had to wait for the guy next to you to exhale. I would say the overcrowding was the worst of it, but then I’d be ignoring the, ahem, facilities, the use of which required special breathing apparatus generally employed only by fire-fighters entering a burning building.

At least there was a fire pit, which supplied us with that thing most valued by men since primitive times: A place to drink beer. I’ve heard you can also use a fire pit to build a fire, but this is strictly a secondary function of the thing.

Now, I would have been happy to spend the entire weekend using the fire pit for its primary purpose, but on the way in, The Lovely Mrs. T noticed a great many tourist shops along the main drag leading to the campsite. For Mrs. T, a vacation without shopping is like a day without shopping, which, according to her, is a bad thing.

So off to the shops we went.

The sunglasses in the first shop we went to were reasonably priced and I found a pair that made me look exactly like Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix.” Except older, fatter, uglier and with a beard. This was still close enough for me. I took ‘em up to the counter and dropped them next to the stuff Mrs. T had there.

There were more sunglasses displayed in a rack on the counter and I checked these out while Mrs. T paid for her purchases. None of them made me look like anybody famous or attractive, so I held on to the pair I’d picked out earlier.

“Is that all, sir?” asked the girl at the counter.

I realized she’d finished with Mrs. T and was ready to ring up my sunglasses.

“Oh, yup, that’s it,” I said, digging for my wallet.

As the girl rang up my purchase and made change, I put one arm around Mrs. Taylor, resting my hand lightly on her hip. Actually, my hand was resting somewhat south of her hip, but what the heck, we were on vacation! Propriety be damned! I added an affectionate pat, and turned to give her a peck on the cheek.

The cheek presented to me, however, belonged to someone other than Mrs. Taylor. A cute young blonde girl, who was no doubt wondering why a middle-aged (assuming I live to be at least 100) man had his hand on her fanny.

I was wondering the same thing.

“Oh, uh, sorry,” I mumbled. “Thought you were my wife.”

The girl said nothing, but continued to stare at me. It took me a second to realize I had yet to remove my hand from her backside. I did so now.

“Um, really,” I said. “You look kind of like her, and...”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

I scanned the store quickly, spotted Mrs. Taylor standing by the door examining touristy post-cards. “There she is now!” I exclaimed.

I trotted across the store and put my arm around Mrs. T - the real one this time - in an effort to prove I wasn’t a long-lost relative of Jack the Ripper.

The impostor turned back to her shopping with a silent glare.

As dumb as grabbing the wrong tush was, I managed a follow-up trick that was even dumber: I told Mrs. Taylor about it. She’s not the jealous type, and was more amused than annoyed. So amused, in fact, that a week later she’s still asking at the end of every work day: “So, Perv-o, who’s booty did you grab today?”

Mrs. Taylor’s comedy routine needs some fine-tuning.

Comments

[fire pits]

Well, it’ s official. The shortest day of the year is done. We had a bit of a pagan solstice celebration complete with fire in our backyard fire pit and consumption of strangely intoxicating brews, but minus the human sacrifice and the nudity (We considered sacrificing the cats, but they proved difficult to catch). The stars and moon were out, the weather clear and, once I had recovered from the shock of my network going down for several hours, I really enjoyed bringing in solstice with friends.