We all know what a “Honey Do” List is, right? It’s that wonderful list kept by almost every woman on which she tells her beloved sweetie pie what tasks around the house need to be done next.
~ ~ • ~ ~
[If you’ve always thought that people were talking about a “Honeydew” List I’m sorry to disabuse of this charming, albeit wrong, idea. We women are not keeping lists about melons. We’re keeping lists about things to do.]
So getting to my point, in our household the “Honey Do” List has been renamed. As we all know Zen-Den gets to the essence of things, and in this case he got it right when he began to refer to what you might call a “Honey Do” List as:
Talk about being disoriented. As if getting up pre-dawncrack isn’t difficult enough, I now have worm of the ear going on… and it’s the wrong worm.
Botheration.
# # #
Here’s the deal. Zen-Den sets our clock radio to wake us at 5:30 a.m. each morning. But last night he changed the wake-up time to 5:15 a.m. because he needed to get going earlier than usual.
He did not tell me about the change.
So this morning the alarm, which is set to a local radio station, went off earlier than normal. When the alarm/radio goes off at its usual time I’m already a little bit awake so it’s not too much of a shock to me. But this morning the alarm/radio startled me out of my deep sleep.
Obviously.
# # #
And in my sleepy mind it seemed like the radio was LOUDER than usual as it played an oldie: “Angel of the Morning.” Not a bad tune, but slowly as I began to wake up I realized that it wasn’t the right woman singing the song.
Who are you? And what are you doing in my morning?
So I laid there in bed trying to figure out what the heck was going on. I could confirm with a glance at the clock radio that it was the wrong wake-up time, but the singer/angel situation flummoxed me.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
# # #
So now, later in the morning after a few mugs of coffee, I have been able to make sense of what happened. Come to find out there are many versions of “Angel of the Morning.”
The first one, the right one, the best one, the one that my mind would have accepted without confusion, sung by Juice Newton, is:
The second one that I was familiar with but didn’t grow up listening to, sung by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, is:
But the wrongest one, the one that was forced on me this morning and is still lurking in its worm-ear-y way within my brain, the one that apparently is the original version, sung by Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts, is:
Three lawyers [husband, friend and acquaintance] all listened to me tell this story and all three of them told me I had it wrong.
Yet I maintain that this is what happened to us, so I’m going to tell this story my way because this is my blog and I’m a pragmatist who says that:
if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.
• • •
Curious about what happened to us? Well, here’s how I see it:
We received a letter from the IRS telling us they needed information re: one piece of one tax return.
We [and by “we” I mean Z-D, obviously] found this piece of information and sent it to the IRS.
We received another letter from the IRS saying that they had received the information and that they’d be in touch to tell us what was going to happen next.
So I think that you’ll agree with me, A NON-LAWYER, when I say that: we’re being audited by the IRS. I say this because the definition for the word “audit” is: “an official inspection of accounts.” [Look it up, boys.]
And what exactly is the IRS asking of us? Why my goodness gracious, they want to inspect our account. Ergo, I say that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then. it’s. a. duck.
I went to the grocery to pick up a few things for dinner. Me with a list, even. Rather clued into what was going on around me.
As I was walking into the lobby of the store I thought that I recognized another woman walking into the store. I wasn’t sure at first, but I thought that this woman was my R.A. during my sophomore year of college.
At a small liberal arts university nowhere near here. About eleventy hundred years ago.
# # #
As she was grabbing for a shopping cart and turned toward me, I realized that she was, indeed, my R.A. in college, who I hadn’t seen in decades. So I exclaimed her name. Loudly.
Fortunately, she didn’t seem fazed by some crazy woman, moi, shouting at her. And in fact we began to talk. After a few minutes of re-connecting in the lobby of the grocery, she suggested we meet for lunch.
Which we did and had a great time of it. We even plan to get together again next month to continue the conversation.
# # #
This would be the end of the story if it weren’t for the weirdest coincidence that happened later in the day. While at lunch my former R.A. told me that she had grown up in a town that I’d never heard of before, a small town in the next state over.
That evening Z-D came home from work and told me that he had to get up early to drive to a meeting somewhere he had never been to before.
Where was he going? To a little town in the next state over where my R.A. had grown up.
THE SPECTACLED BEAN 
