Published Thursday, March 20, 2008 11:50 AM
Updated Thursday, March 20, 2008 11:52 AM
Inklings 03/21/08
Careless CalamityWhenever my German-born grosmom (grandma) messed up, she’d thump her forehead three times with a balled fist, while muttering grumpily to herself in a soft Bavarian accent, “Duum, duum, duum like hell!” I knew exactly how she felt a couple of weeks ago when I lost my calendar notebook.
What would you do if you lost your scheduler overflowing with all your addresses, important meeting and writing notes, medical appointments, shopping lists and three prescriptions from three different doctors that you hadn’t gotten filled yet? How ‘bout if you had just that very week cleaned it out, organized your organizer, put in fresh paper, and updated everything? Yes, I went back to the shopping center, back through the parking lot, back in the store. I did all that 15 minutes after I missed the notebook and five times since. But not first.
First I boo-hooed. Then I prayed. Maybe if I had reversed that order somebody might have found the thing and called me. But alas and alack, neither tears nor petitions brought my lovely sage green, six-hole lifeline back to me. That thing had years of my best stuff in there! What was I going to do? Well, pull myself together, blow my nose, and get busy replacing everything I possibly could.
I modernized grosmom’s self-castigation by delivering dozens of mental kicks to my posterior over the next several days and was bemoaning my loss to fellow members of The Summerville Writers Guild one night. Author Nina Bruhns informed me that it wasn’t my fault. Turns out it was Mercury’s.
My head may be in the stars sometimes, but not my mind, so she had to enlighten me. It seems that at the very time of my loss in late February, Mercury was in retrograde, which was a time that bred havoc. There was an eclipse of the moon, we shot down that satellite, and were about to experience leap-year day. She felt sure that after all these events had passed I’d get the notebook back. That didn’t happen either.
As many of the missing addresses and phone numbers are of out of town relatives and friends, I can get much of that information from my sister. Others are going to have to be replaced when Christmas cards come in again. The rest I’ll have to get by digging through the phone book. Medical appointments are going to be such a pain as I’m at the age and stage where I see three different doctors on three to four month cycles – and of course, not on the same rotations – so I’m going to have to call them all and retrieve that information. Naturally, I made those dates well until the autumn. I am seriously thinking of asking the surgeon who replaced my knees if he could attach a new notebook to some permanent body part. But as I am well into senior citizenship who knows what body parts are going to remain constant, so maybe that’s out. I can’t even blame my lapse on seniority as I’ve been doing “duum” stuff like this all my life.
Ah well, maybe it was Mercury after all.