“Honey, what’s wrong with this ice tray?” I peer at the blue-top box in our freezer, half-buried under our frozen peas and blueberries.
“What ice tray?” My partner’s face appears next to mine. His eyes find our broken ice tray. “Oh, it’s been broken for ages.”
“No. Not the broken one.” I point to the square box with a blue top. “This one.”
My partner’s gaze follows my finger. “We have a second ice tray?!”
I pull the box out and open the lid to reveal an ice tray, then lift the tray to find a smattering of perfectly-shaped ice cubes. We both stare in disbelief at the ice tray we didn’t know we had.
“I’ll be damned.”
Let’s buy an ice tray
Let’s buy an ice tray, my partner had said a few weeks earlier. We were on our shopping trip to Thailand and browsing the kitchenware section in a mall. Sure, I’d said. We can get it when we’re back in Vietnam.
Onto our shopping list “ice tray” went. Once back in Ho Chi Minh City, we began looking for it every time we went groceries shopping. As our search continued, fruitless, we started fantasising about what iced drinks we’d make once we finally had the ice tray. My partner would make Thai iced lemon tea with the tea bags we’d bought from Thailand. I’d make cute, animal-shaped cubes for my lime sodas. The possibilities were endless… if only we had an ice tray.
All that time, the blue-top box was sitting right in front of our eyes. We must have gone into our freezer dozens of times to retrieve chicken, blueberries, meals during the weeks we spent ice-tray hunting. Not once did we notice the tray we already had.
It wasn’t until we’d bought a new ice tray and I was making room for it in the freezer that my eyes finally registered the blue-top box.
I’ll be damned indeed.
What else am I not seeing?
As it turns out, that blue-top box was my partner’s ice tray which he’d had for more than a decade. It had been in our freezer from the day we moved into our apartment. It had been there so long—half-buried under our frozen foods—that our eyes stopped seeing it, and when a year ago we fell out of the habit of making iced drinks we simply forgot we had it.
The ice-tray incident provided my partner and I with comic relief for a time. It became a running joke and we laughed ourselves silly each time one of us dropped “the ice tray!” into a conversation that had nothing to do with refrigeration. But beneath the hilarity of the situation lay a disturbing question that’s been on my mind ever since: what else am I not seeing?
For years, I’d been using the ice tray. How could I completely forget we had it? Why did I, not once, question our snap decision to buy an ice tray? Surely I should have realised we must already own an ice tray if we’d lived in the same apartment for years and the question of buying an ice tray never came up.
How could I be totally blind to something right in front of my face?
As forgotten items go, an ice tray is rather unremarkable and unlikely to set off a devastating chain reaction. We forgot we already had an ice tray so we bought one more and now we have two. Hardly the end of the world.
But what if I forget something more important? What if I forget why I do the things I do, my lifelong mission to change people’s lives? What if I forget how to be a good person and end up hurting others? What if I forget the very people in my life I should spend every minute cherishing—the people who’ve stood by me so steadfastly, so quietly all these years that I’ve stopped seeing them? What if I forget what makes me who I am, my essence, my humanity?
What if, amidst the vagaries of life, I stop seeing the things that truly matter?
What then?
What do you think?
Our invisible ice tray has gotten me very pensive indeed. And I hope it gives you pause as well:
What are you potentially not seeing in your life?
What’s your version of our blue-top box, sitting in our freezer uncomplaining and unseen? Please hit “reply” or leave a comment—I read every response and I’d love to hear from you. If you want, share this with someone who’s got better vision than I do.
Until next Friday… Stay thoughtful,
Val