Slip Up

May 11, 2009

Thank you for sharing a laugh with me about the Mother of the Year award, and for the other gentle messages I received from you this weekend. I appreciated all of them, though I would have traded any one of them for a warning that the postal rates went up today, leaving me needing to buy a boatload of two cent stamps to pair up with my lovely 42 cent stamps of Wyoming (truly one of Erin's favorite places in the world, once she got over sharing that love with Wyoming's best known resident, former VP Cheney). Yes, before you say it, I did invest in a whole lot of "forever" stamps (they have liberty bells on them), but on the advice of Elaine, who really chewed me out for even considering to use my usual flag stamps, I bought a quantity of "meaningful" and "beautiful" stamps that I thought I could use up before the deadline. Oops. Letter writing never goes as fast as you think it will, nor do you ever start as quickly as you plan (I think these are both corollaries to the Law of Term Papers).

So, my mom and I did some meaningful things together yesterday. We went to church and lunch together (Gina's had a complimentary chocolate fountain and dippable strawberries for those of you who don't care for your chocolate straight up in a shot glass or tumbler.). We picked up three wheel barrows full of sticks and branches in the back yard that had blown down in recent storms to make way for the lawn mower. We also proved ourselves a few trumps short of a winning hand.

My mom, Super LTA (library technical assistant?), reads more than anyone I know. Every once in a while (usually on a weekend), she finds herself bereft of reading material and comes to my house to scrounge around for a book she hasn't read. Over lunch we had discussed a book that we had both thought she had already read, but as luck would have it she had skipped over it and read the next one in the series. I had bought it and read it and thought she would like it, so I told her to stop over later and get it.

So, it was no surprise when she came over later and asked for it. In fact, she said, "Just tell me where it is, and I won't interrupt what you are involved in."

Had I known, I would have told her, but I didn't . Since we have book shelves and nooks tucked all over the house, I just told her I would go and grab it for her. I went to the most logical place, then the next most logical place, then the third most logical place. No luck. I probed from room to room, ending up checking shelves in Erin and Davis's rooms. No luck. Eventually, I went back to the most logical place, and it had not magically appeared. I'm thinking, OMG, I'm actually going to have to clean my house from top to bottom because I have set a book down that I just finished reading about ten days ago, and it has sunken into the morass my house has become and completely disappeared. My mom was patient with me, and before leaving, asked casually if I might have lent it to someone. I told her I didn't think so, but maybe I had and had completely forgotten.

She went back home, and I returned to my desk.

About twenty minutes later the phone rang. My mom told me I had lent the book to someone. . .her.

She told me I could write about how both of us were slipping in our golden years, but only if I put a very flattering photo of her up with the story.