From the author: Published on the author’s website Almost all children and adults know the wonderful poem by S.Ya. Marshak. But not everyone knows that one of the prototypes of the eccentric hero was the author himself. Recalling Marshak’s visit to Italy, his colleague writes: “... our dear Marshak dropped his glasses, then stepped on them and crushed them - what a horror: there were no spare glasses. There were many such stories: something was always forgotten, lost and etc. Taking into account the Roman heat, sirocco and all the additional troubles that arose due to Samuil Yakovlevich’s absent-mindedness, we sometimes tried to lecture him. Nothing helped, we had to accept him for who he was. Moreover, he was charming. "Another prototype of the Absent-Minded Marshak was an authoritative scientist in the field of chemistry and physics, Professor I.A. Heels. Before boarding the tram, he actually took off his galoshes. When he wanted to say the phrase “the flask burst, and a piece of glass fell into the eye,” he blurted out: “the flask burst, and a piece of the eye fell into the glass.” Another scientist famous for his absent-mindedness was Isaac Newton. One day he was found in the kitchen holding a chicken egg in his palm and carefully studying it. Water was boiling in a saucepan nearby. And this would not be so bad - but while Newton was satisfying his curiosity about the egg, a pocket watch was sadly boiling in a saucepan. Sir Isaac could well have gone to dinner, calmly walked past the dining room, went out into the street and only then remembered where he was going. Well, on the way back, he forgot about his goal again and went up to the room upstairs. Another example of absent-mindedness is the geographer Jacques Paganel, whose role in the wonderful Soviet film “The Children of Captain Grant” was brilliantly played by Nikolai Cherkasov. Absent-mindedly, Paganel learned Portuguese instead of Spanish. By mistake he ends up on the yacht Duncan, owned by Lord Glenarvan. As a result of Paganel's mistake in the letter, the lives of the entire detachment were saved. The entire plot develops on the basis of Paganel’s mistakes and inattention. Gogol’s heroine from “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka...” is distinguished by a slightly different type of absent-mindedness. Vasilisa Kashparovna wants to marry Shponka and dreams of grandchildren. “Often, when making some kind of cake, which she never trusted the cook in general, she, having forgotten herself and imagining that her little granddaughter was standing next to her asking for a pie, absentmindedly extended her hand to him with the best piece, and the yard dog, taking advantage of this, grabbed a tasty morsel and with her loud slurping brought her out of her reverie, for which she was always beaten with a poker.” From more modern literature, from Ulitskaya, there is another example. “Pavel Alekseevich... just wandered around the apartment, every now and then bumping into little notes that his wife Elena wrote to herself. Touching notes that always began with the same words: don’t forget... And then it went on - buy apples, take your laundry to the laundry, have your bag repaired... It was funny that there were a lot of these notes, and they all said the same thing - apples, laundry, repair..." And in our everyday life we ​​often suffer from inattention. Because of it, we forget to make important calls, congratulate a loved one on their birthday, keep a promise, stop by the store on the way, buy every single necessary product, pick up a child from kindergarten, charge a mobile phone on time, lose keys, wallets, umbrellas, etc. cell phones, we get into an accident, we’re late, we miss a meeting. Due to absent-mindedness, we take a long time to get ready for school or work, trying to find everything we need and not forget anything, we lose our thoughts mid-sentence, we are distracted from things at work, we chronically fail to keep up, our scrambled eggs burn, our indoor flowers dry out. In Russian, especially in the Soviet public consciousness, lack of composure was not considered a serious sin. However, in modern Russia the situation is different: organization and punctuality are naturally expected and necessary qualities of every responsible adult.