How Dumb Can I Be?

Very, apparently. Recently, one of my daughters was visiting. We'd made pumpkin bread and as she was packing, I asked her if she'd like to take a loaf home. She did, so I wrapped it in foil and put it in a Ziplock bag. She threw it in her carry on and I dropped her at the airport. Funny thing, a loaf of pumpkin bread looks a lot like a brick of explosives, if you're trained to think that way. The TSA agent seemed very nervous. My daughter offered to unwrap the bread and all was well. I believe the problem is that I just happily bop along in life, not giving deep, or even much, thought to everyday things. I'm such an innocent that "Is this criminal or dangerous?" never runs through my mind. The first time I experienced this was decades ago, when my husband was in the Army and we were living in Germany. West Germany, to be precise. The Berlin Wall was still up and the border between East and West Germany was a serious thing. On the roads leading to a border crossing there were signs warning that the border was in 5 kilometers. American military personnel were forbidden to pass those signs. My husband and I had taken a weekend to explore in an unfamiliar area of the country and were enjoying the scenery when suddenly there were some guards and a gate up ahead. We pulled to the side of the road. It took a couple of seconds to realize what we were looking at. Before we could turn around the Military Police had pulled up. He was soundly chastised for passing the sign and his ID info was taken. Of course, no one believed that we hadn't passed a sign. But we hadn't--we checked on our way out. We spent much of the rest of the weekend talking about how we could have been so dumb. This could have been the end of his career, but it had a happy ending. One of his senior officers found out that the young MPs had lost the info and were worried that it had been a test that they had obviously failed. He was off the hook. As I said, it's amazing how dumb you can be when you have no idea that it's a possibility. I feel as though I should be able to say lesson learned, and be vigilant about this sort of thing. But unless I develop a more world-weary personality, I think I'm destined to be incredibly dumb every now and then.