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When I was in elementary school, we would take a trip to the planetarium every school year. This was before the age of school budget cuts. I’m sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. Anyway, we would go and the session would start out with some classroom time. The teacher was the same guy, year after year. I really looked forward to these field trips and they were lots of fun. So after the classroom, we’d go into the planetarium for the presentation, and then return to the classroom for the rest of the day.

The planetarium was down the hall from the classroom. When we left the planetarium, we would sprint down the hall back to the classroom. The thing was, the teacher was still in the room when we left the planetarium, but always was already in the classroom after we ran 100 feet down the hall. Whoa. It was like magic every time. The guy didn’t have more than five seconds before we were there, but he never failed. He was in the room, standing at the desk, like he’d been there the whole time. It was amazing.

Every year, he’d ask one kid to guess how he got there so fast. And each year, the kid he called on would guess the door that was behind the desk at the front of the room. Well that must have just been a storage room because that wasn’t it. So each and every year, some kid would guess the same door, and every year, it still wasn’t the right answer. He would always tell us that he’d give us the correct answer when we were in the fifth grade (our last year of elementary school).

Finally in fifth grade it was time to go and I couldn’t wait to get the answer (yeah, didn’t have a lot to look forward to in those years). Remember, I had sat through four years of some idiot kid guessing the same thing year after year. The day arrived and the trip was canceled because the guy was sick. It was rescheduled, but we never went because, rest his soul, the man died.

I never found out how he got to the classroom so quickly. This was probably twenty years ago and it still drives me crazy to this day.

My point in telling you this is to reiterate gifts for men rules # 3 and 7. If your man relays to you some sad story such as this, use it to your advantage. Plan a trip to the planetarium so he can relive those memories of youth. It’s often very interesting where men hide their gift idea hints. You’ve just got to be on the lookout.