How many mistakes can I make in one day?

Calling my mother in Berkeley from my office was a mistake. The thought was: I’m in between tasks, I can take 10 minutes to catch up and see how she is. The reality was: I was late for all other appointments for the rest of the day because the call did NOT take 10 minutes. As my cell phone minutes ticked away at $.45 each, I was entertained by a run through every unhappy event that could be reasonably woven into the conversation, occasionally interspersed with connecting phrases such as “mind you, I’m not complaining.”

And she really wasn’t entirely complaining. But when you are eighty, the stories get longer and more numerous and repeated for added emphasis. I mean, why tell the one about how mental illness is rampant in this country, in her apartment building, in our family, among friends only once when you can repeat it, with abundant illustrations, at an interval of every 5 minutes? A happy spin: I was glad that she was basically okay, and that there were no more hard feelings about my trip to the desert. Moreover, she guessed that I had voted for Edwards and seemed resigned to possibly doing the same, though she was still toying with the idea of casting her vote for Dean since his name would appear on the ticket. I figure I have seven days to convince her that sending a “sympathy card” might have greater therapeutic value for the guy than handing him a useless, solitary “sympathy vote.” Though I suppose her vote might not stand alone: in Berkeley Dean may still win even though he’s not running.

Leaving my ATM card in the ATM machine was a mistake. The thought was: I am so efficient! Watch me drive up to the machine at Hildale and reenter the traffic pattern at virtually the same place – how cool and speedy is that! The reality was: I was so inefficient that I didn’t even notice that I had left my card behind; in fact, I am not sure that it is in the machine. It could be anywhere. The one place it is not is in my wallet, so that later on at the grocery store, I caused a collective gritting of the teeth as I did the classic dumping of purse contents on the counter while everyone waited not-so-patiently behind me. A happy spin: I will get a new card and a new pin number. My old pin was an assortment of the most irrelevant to my life digits you could imagine. For example, it didn’t have a single 4 in it, but for some reason it included such numbers as 7. Everyone knows I have no good vibes around 7.

Day is still young, so many hours to mess with. Stay tuned.