The Culler Curse

Disaster!

Off and on all day yesterday, I puzzled over what to write this week. Some weeks the words flow like a fast stream onto the screen.

Then there are those other times, when Billie says, “You know, none of your subscribers will show up at the door if you miss a week.”

R–E–T–I–R–E–D? Isn’t that how you spell it? Why have I turned my avocation into a job with DEADLINES?

So yesterday was one of those days where I struggled with not being able to decide what to write and being anxious about it, and rereading everything I’ve posted in the last three years so as not to duplicate.

Then, OMG, It’s 5:30! I’m cooking tonight, and I can’t remember how to cook the shredded chicken with gravy. I’m late, and I haven’t defrosted the chicken, and now Pip, old black lab with diabetes and a UTI, needs to go out.

Now that’s done, where’s the recipe, oh yeah, tucked into the front cover of Lynne’s cookbook. I reached for the shelf in the cabinet to the right of the stove. . . .

Brrrraaaangcrraceenkrashareenkingrakingingingtinkletinkle! An explosion. Glass everywhere, everywhere, glass shards, slivers, and splinters all over the counter, and the floor, and the table across the room.

“What was that?!”    

“Broke the spare coffee pot . . . no wait, both, coffee pots.”

We store the spare Melita pour-through pot next to the cookbooks and I had evidently pulled it airborne when I snatched the cookbook and it had tumbled onto the part-full coffeepot below, breaking off the spout and rim.

“I know just what you did. Culler Curse!” said Billie as she went to order new Melita pots and I went for the broom, dustpan, and vacuum cleaner.

Thanksgiving

Things to be grateful for:

I wasn’t cut, or hurt in any way. No one else was in the kitchen, so no picking glass out of the dog, or the wife, or grandchildren’s eyes. Miraculously, the part-full coffee pot on the counter only lost its rim so no mopping or repainting the walls required. Melita coffee pots are replaceable, even if they won’t be delivered till Friday. I hadn’t started to cook dinner yet, so no throwing away a glass littered half-cooked meal.

We are all still alive, mostly vertical, and as healthy as late seventy-somethings ever are -technically the dog is in her human-year eighties, and is showing her age, but is no worse for the glass-splosion in the evening kitchen, caused by the Culler Curse.

The Curse

It was my eldest sister’s late husband, also called Alan, who observed that “Culler’s are all clumsy.” We did tend to trip around my brother-in-law, and bump into door frames, and drop breakables. He would laugh, shake his head, and mutter, “Claaah-um-see!”

I began to wonder how much of our ineptitude was endemic and how much was the anxiety produced by Alan’s ever-present judgement. Were my sisters and I, and my children just performing up to his expectation.

At family gatherings though, when the subject would come up, we’d find that “the curse” showed itself in all our lives at various times even when my brother-in-law was nowhere to be seen.

“It’s just that you’re kinetic,” my kind wife tells me. “You have an energy about you. It’s why electronics so often malfunction around you. And your body is always moving, sometimes in ways that bear no relationship to what you are doing at the moment.”

I don’t know who coined the name the “Culler curse,” but it clearly stuck. The curse is passed down genetically. Not everybody has it or at least has it equally. Most agree that my great niece, Lauren, Alan’s granddaughter, has the curse, but her brother and sister not so much.

My children have the curse, though in varying degrees. My late cousin Jeannine, who sailed around the South Pacific, said “it visits me occasionally and with a vengeance when it comes, but the curse isn’t always there.”

The curse comes in cycles. Today I talked to my sister, Lynne, who told me, “We have a coffee pot that doesn’t fit the maker because, I have broken not one, but two recently, setting them down too hard on the counter. I also talked to my youngest daughter who regaled me with the story of the burn on her hand, injured because she decided she didn’t need the hot water she’d just boiled to mix with her espresso, but then reached for her coffee placing her hand into the steam stream from the kettle.

I remember my mother asking, ”Alan where did you get that scratch on your leg?”

“I dunno”

“Oh Alan, Honey, you need to pay attention.”

Absence of Mindfulness

My mother called me “accident prone,” and said the many minor scratches and cuts that I got as a child were from “not paying attention.” She was right.

If we look at this example, I grabbed for the cookbook, oblivious to the fact that the spare coffee pot was next to it. I was anxious, about not writing, about being late, about not remembering how to cook the dish. I was in my head, and that part of my head was out of touch with the part of my head controlling my body.

I needed to not be on autopilot, to pay attention to what I was doing at the moment, in short to be mindful. The absence of mindfulness sets the “Culler curse” free. When the curse is free, however, it can do things that cause people to say “what are the chances?”, like tumbling one coffee pot out of the cabinet and hit another on the way down.

“You couldn’t do that again if you tried.”

“Yep, Culler curse.”

Of course, we could also look at anticipating the Culler curse. I use the cookbooks, so maybe find a new place for the spare coffee pot.

One more thing to be grateful for. I didn’t break the entire second pot. Coffee is very important in this household and the replacement isn’t coming till Friday. (See the second pot repaired with duct tape above.)

Now what could go wrong with this picture?

“Yep, Culler curse.”