I’m clumsy. Really, that’s putting it lightly.

Growing up, things that required patience and grace held no interest for me. I wanted what I wanted right now and I wasn’t willing to practice walking with a book on my head to get it. The end result is that I’m clumsy. I trip over things that aren’t there. I ignore the lack of space between me and other objects and knock things over. My feet slide out from under me from lack of searching for good footing before shifting my weight. I rush around so much that sometimes I have trouble playing video games. I go too fast, die a hundred times and give up before I realize that if I just slow down I would do okay.

So it was no surprise, really, when I eventually dropped the anniversary present I got for Master this year. It wasn’t even much of a surprise when it shattered into a million pieces. However, it was heartbreaking. And it was a surprise when Master said He was going to beat me for it.

When we first got together, He would yell at me constantly because I was always bumping into things. Inanimate things like walls and chairs and doors. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see them. It was that I was moving so fast by the time I realized I was too close that I couldn’t veer away fast enough. It still happens sometimes. This mostly means scraped arms and legs and sometimes broken objects. But He’s never beaten me for it.

He said, “Maybe you’ll learn to slow down and watch what you’re doing and how you hold things after this.”

I guess it worked. At least some. Last night, when making dinner, instead of just plunging my hand into everything and trying to pull things from the back out, I moved things out of the way and then put them back when I was finished. This morning, when making breakfast, instead of trying to reach through the cinnamon, brown sugar, tuna fish and a few other things, open the oatmeal box and pull the packets through all those items again, I pulled each item from the shelf, got out the oatmeal and placed each item (mostly) how I found them (which is also how I left them). An old dog can learn new tricks, I suppose.