Sat., April 14, 42 A.B.Vitamin E: Passport To The Twilight Zone
On March 16, 1962, the CBS television network first broadcast "Little Girl Lost," the 33rd episode of the third season of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. The plot involved the disappearance of a young girl named Tina after she rolls under her bed. Seems she fell through a hole into another dimension. With the help of her dog and a friend who just happens to be
a physicist, Mom and Dad manage to get Tina back just before the
hole she fell through closes back up. "Another few seconds," the physicist tells Dad just after Dad has pulled his daughter back, "and half of you would have been here and the other half...."The other half where? The fourth dimension? The fifth? Perhaps.
They never found the answer. Despite a battery of research physicists equipped with every device known to man, electronic and otherwise, no result was ever achieved, except perhaps a little more respect for and uncertainty about the mechanisms of the Twilight Zone. - Serling's
closing narrationAll of which came back to me this morning when my wife took a vitamin E pill from the kitchen cabinet I keep them in and attempted to get it to my place at the kitchen table without incident. Usually she can when she
tries, just as I usually can when I undertake the same task during the
week, but today...Today she dropped the pill just before getting it safely to the table. It hit
the floor and then...It was a fairly large pill - a chewable tablet about the size of two Tylenols.
The floor is smooth linoleum. We both got down and searched. No pill.
No pill anywhere. It could have rolled a bit - but where? Where does a
pill hide on a smooth expanse of empty floor? Under the microwave cart
some distance away in an unlikely direction? We checked. Behind the
open door to my office? We checked. Down the distant heating duct
with grate-holes too small for such a pill to slip through? I pulled the grate and checked the level ductwork beneath.No pill.
No pill anywhere.
Not having a physicist friend I might call, I sat and pondered and blinked
a lot.And then I remembered - this has happened before.
There's a restaurant up in Sandusky, Ohio, adjacent to the Cedar Point amusement park - a restaurant called called Bay Harbor. A few years
ago my wife, myself, and her parents had dinner there. It was a good dinner, and when it was done, our waitress brought us each a big chocolate mint wrapped in foil. My wife proceeded to drop hers and...No mint.
No mint anywhere.
Before I remembered this, I'd thought I might never be able to eat in my kitchen again without fear of being sucked into the same hole that swallowed my vitamin E.
Now I'm afraid what might happen if my wife ever loses her grip while
trying to lift or carry me.As if I didn't have enough worries already!
Needless to say, the big plans I had for today involving my wandering haphazardly through my myrtle like a drunken bee were pre-empted by
aerobic quivering.If only it hadn't been my favorite vitamin that had disappeared so unexpectedly...
If only this mysterious Other Dimension had had the decency to take all the cat hair that has collected under the kitchen table while it was at it!
Pan up to an immense, star-studded night sky.
Fade to black.
(©Now by DJ Birtcher and whatever alien pod people
that might be germinating at this very moment
deep within his vermiculite-enriched head)