Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

The view from Wendy's World

There are times when a very simple action can create quite a stir. The event in question wasnt a huge deal - just very puzzling.

Someone walked by my car which was parked outside the office in Prescott and put a stack of clothes hangers on my antennae.

There must have been more than a dozen hangers. I dashed out to run an errand mid-morning on Thursday and there they were. My brain was immediately derailed and I forgot all about my errand.

I called my daughter even though I couldnt imagine that shed left the hangers on my car. I spoke to the only other person here in the office who claimed to know nothing about it. I walked around the car, looking for some other clue.

Nothing.

Ive wondered if there was a message intended in this action. Maybe someone is telling me I have too many hangups. Maybe someone suddenly lost all their hangups, a bunch of empty hangers and my car antennae happened to be handy. Perhaps someone was moving and there was no room in the van for the hangers, so they looked for a place to put them. The ideas Ive come up with have gotten progressively more ridiculous.

If the intention was to make me wonder, the person who left the hangers certainly succeeded.

These were plastic hangers - the kind you buy when a kid heads off to live in the dorm room for the first time. The same kind that seem to multiply in my closet so that I now have plenty of hangers of my own.

Hangers are among the great mysteries of life. It ranks right up there with socks. I can never figure out how I manage to loose socks between my bathroom hamper, the washing machine and back to the living room to fold the clean clothes. Where do they go?

Its almost the same with hangers. One minute I look in the closet and find dozens of empty hangers. Then I go to put away the laundry and there are not enough hangers. Maybe socks and hangers gather for parties at their friends houses. Maybe my lost socks just ended up in the laundry basket across town. Maybe those were really my hangers and they simply found themselves far from home looking for a ride back.

Or maybe someone is just trying to see how many ridiculous stories I can come up with to explain the hangers on my antennae.

It certainly worked.