1. I stirred my tea to dissolve the sugar in it — except that I hadn’t added any sugar to it.
2. I unlocked my cell-phone and listened for a dial-tone. It took me a few seconds to realize there would be none.

On my way back from the tennis-courts, I saw a deer with two younger ones playing around in the grass. The fawns had white spots on their bodies that presum­ably served to camou­flage them. Unfor­tu­nately, I couldn’t take a picture of them with my cell-phone camera, because I didn’t have it with me then.

And speaking of cell-phones, I got mine replaced with another piece of the same model because there was something wrong with the sound quality in my previous one.

Everyone in the US is expected to have a phone. If you sign up for a newsletter, they will ask you to give them a phone-number. When you tell them you don’t have one, they will be stunned, shocked and upset. They will look at you in utter disbe­lief, and wring their hands in despair, faced with the terrible act of leaving that field blank.

You feel guilty that you have been the cause of this awful situa­tion. You try to calm them down. You stammer an excuse. You will be getting a phone in a day or so.

They heave a sigh of relief. Gradu­ally, every­thing returns to normal; they ask you to update them with this infor­ma­tion as soon as possible.

You are normal after all.