The many cups broken and glasses shattered, every bit of food dropped, every drink spilled by a heedless sweep of the hand.

It made me wonder: had an unspoken or unknown family curse fallen on me?

If you don’t dig what I’m going on about, ask my brothers and sisters and friends. They know.

That is, to quote one among my circle, who shall remain nameless: “Whale is one of the ‘breakingest guys around.’” In other words, a fumbler of tumblers, captain of klutzes, and messy too.

Remember Laverne and Shirley singing about “schlemiel, schlimazel,” in the introduction to their TV show? According to Leo Rosten’s “Treasury of Yiddish Humor,” the schlemiel is the guy who’s always spilling hot soup … right down the neck of a schlimazel. Combine the types in one soul, and you get person who could drop a piano from a third-floor window and somehow rush down to the street in time to catch it on his own head.

For most of my life, that’s how I felt about myself.

I always admired, but could never grasp, the easy grace my father showed in keeping a tidy desk, a spotless room, a shirt or pair of pants stain- and wrinkle-free. Where had he picked that up? I tried again and again to make these things happen, but the efforts fizzled, the machine conked, the mystery remained.

Instead, it seemed to me over time that, like the stripes imprinted on a tiger’s very skin, the Creator had incised into my flesh, perhaps into my soul, a pair of discarded socks, a wrinkled jacket, a broken lamp — lasting tokens of my destiny.

And, alongside them, a striking capacity for bad luck. If my friends and I were up to something, say, toilet-papering a house or joining a food fight — not that I ever did any such things — I was the one who always got caught. How many times did I hear when I caught up with my luckier pals again: “Only to you, it could only happen to you!”

This bad luck impressed on me a strong argument, apart from clumsiness, for avoiding military service. I feared that in the heat of battle, my misfortune would fall on others, with potentially fatal consequences.

But was any of that true? Could I have been cursed or trickster-haunted from the cradle?

It’s taken a long time, but at 62, I can at last confidently answer for myself, no. In a recent flash of insight, it hit me: my nemesis, my devil, my imp of the perverse in Poe’s words, is and always has been a short-attention span, most clearly demonstrated by a lack of awareness of what my hands and feet were doing in that moment before mom’s vase broke so inexplicably.

Strange.

I say strange because I can bring to mind the minutiae of almost every book I have ever read, summon quotes from long dead languages, even recall the page numbers on which the words appeared without any effort. Yet, two seconds after I have set an object down, I cannot remember where.

This drives me batty. It does not seem right to me, as I have observed in others over the years, that there are people — not me, but let’s assume a Mr. Jones for the sake of the argument — with arms that could move mountains, but coupled with withered legs.

Strong in one area, hobbled in another.

Why?

I believe the finger of blame in my case points not to any curse, but to something more prosaic: a lifelong habit of doing what has always come easy to me, shutting myself away with books and playing to my strengths by avoiding that act so difficult to the shy person that I am: mingling with actual people, not with elves or fantastic beings found in quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

As Goethe once wrote. “Talent forms itself in solitude, character in the moving waters of the world.”

And if that is true, then my fate is not predetermined. I can do something about it. It may be a bit late in life, and usually it’s not much fun, but at last I am doing something about it.

So, for others similarly afflicted, here are just a few things I am doing to improve:

Slowing down and observing where I am, and what my hands and feet are doing;

Finding three landmarks when I get of my car, so I don’t forget where I’ve parked the thing;

Whatever I am doing, be there, in that moment. Yeah, that may sound a bit New-Agey, but it’s not new, it’s age old.

It was the wise counsel of Brother Lawrence, a monk from the Middle Ages, that when you are, say, washing the dishes, pay attention to everything: the warmth of the water on your arms, the feel of the dishes, the roughness of the scrubber on your hand.

As the Sufis, the mystical branch of Sunni Islam said a long time ago: “The Sufi is the son of time present.”

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.