Most embarrassing moment

It never fails that at some point in your life, someone asks you what your most embarrassing moment is.  For 95% of my days, I couldn’t honestly answer this, because nothing ever seemed quite embarrassing enough to warrant a full confession.  

Sure, there was the time in fifth grade that I neglected to wear underwear because I was so excited about the new outfit I was wearing for my field trip to the museum, but no one really knew.  There was also the time I caught myself falling asleep during a college class and the professor stopped lecturing and asked me, frankly and sternly, if I was trying to stifle a yawn, which I was, and I was as mortified as I should have been.

But nothing compares to the story that pops to mind now, and I can not look at, touch, or even mention a wheelbarrow without snickering to myself.  Because really, if you can’t look back at your most embarrassing moment and burst into laughter, it just wasn’t that exciting and you need to work harder to humiliate yourself.

My story begins with the background philosophy that if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?  Amazingly enough, this concept works in so many ways during one’s life.  And so I ponder, if a person does something really stupid and there’s no one there to watch her, did it really happen?

And so my story goes.

We ordered an inordinate amount of mulch one summer, and of course we had to get it all spread on a day when the temperature outside compared with the sun.  (This is always the case, but I’ll use the heat as the excuse for my delusion.)   There was so much mulch, in fact, that we asked our good friend and neighbor if we could borrow his wheelbarrow so that my husband and I could both work simultaneously to make the job go faster.  Our neighbor’s wheelbarrow is much nicer than ours, which was literally pieced together by an elderly relative and weighs roughly six thousand pounds.  Needless to say, it was a long day of work and sweat and mulch that sticks to the sweat and ends up in places that you never thought mulch could go.  By the time it was suppertime, there was no way I could muster up the strength to actually prepare anything, so I declared that I was going to head to the store to get a pre-made meal.  I made myself look as presentable as possible, hopped into my car, threw it into reverse, and backed right into/over our neighbor’s magnificent wheelbarrow.

This is the part where the tree-in-the-woods thing comes in, because I stood there behind my car and before I said or did anything, I surveyed the street, making sure no one saw me or heard the screech of twisting metal.  Thankfully, the coast was clear, giving me the opportunity to react like a raging maniac, waving my fists and kicking my car and cussing out my husband who left the wheelbarrow behind my car in the first place.  Once I had finished my little fit, I examined the wheelbarrow and determined that the damage was slight enough to ignore, moved it out of my way, and drove off to the store.

The philosophy, however, didn’t quite work in my favor.  For it just so happens that if a tree falls in the woods