EXPERIENCE
teaches you to recognize a mistake when you’ve made it
again.  I knew that I’d screwed up as
soon as I saw the look on my wife’s face.  It was that dreaded “are you kidding” look.  We were in the grocery store on our
fortnightly shopping mission.  Mormons do
religious missions; we do grocery missions.  She had sent me looking for a specific item and – I thought – I was
bringing it back as directed. 

“She won’t eat the store brand,” I was told with
barely concealed exasperation.  My
daughter, for whom the purchase was being made, has a deeply ingrained
anti-store brand bias.  So I had to do an
about-face and march back several aisles to get the Name Brand. 

See, this goes on all the time.  If she’d only said to me from the beginning
to avoid the store brand, I could have followed those simple instructions.  It is the fault of her inexact
instructions. 

“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“You should’ve known by now.” 

I am a literal person.  If it’s not spelled out, I don’t do it.  Perhaps it is my lawyer’s mind, perhaps it is
the onset of a memory disorder, I don’t know.  One night I baked fish in the oven.  “I thought you were going to cook it on the grill,” she says to me.  “Well, you didn’t tell me you wanted me to
grill it.”  “I thought you knew that.”  The implication here is that I’m using poor
judgment, I suppose.  So here’s the
lesson of experience again.  Good
judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment.  So next time…I’ll grill it…if I remember.