The pattern of threes is everywhere. Sometimes it portends good luck, sometimes not. This little tale is thrice told. I first read it in a newspaper column several weeks ago and since then, I’ve heard the same story from two others- both pleased to share what they thought was exclusively theirs. Maybe the whole thing is an urban myth but myths are often instructive.
The protagonist is a female relative “of a certain age”. She has either recently died, or her family, anticipating it won’t be long, is getting a jump on helping her clean out the stuff she’s squirreled away. The theme is rational v. irrational. And in this tale, irrational has triumphed. In the tidying up, a bag is found with the following label- “Pieces of string too small to use.” The label didn’t lie. Frayed scraps measuring only inches fell out of the bag. If you’re looking for the poster child for irrational, consider it found.
With the first telling, I thought, “What a funny story about how quirky others are.” The second time around, I started to feel a little uneasy. And on the third telling, the adage that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones was hard to ignore.
So, I fished my snippets of yarn out of the bag where they’d been stashed for way too long. I hadn’t labeled them “too small to use”. They’d been saved with the misguided notion that I’d knit them into tiny mittens, hats and stockings to decorate a tiny Christmas tree. I cannot over-emphasize misguided.
There will be no tiny ornaments for a tiny tree. Someone might have actually used these bits, but that someone was not going to be me. The bits are gone. Saving pieces of string (whatever that “string” might be) too small to use, confirms irrationality.
The third telling was the charm. No more trying to rationalize the irrational.