The Weekly Shriek - Making Peace with Error

I'm not perfect.

I hate that.

"Just erase the mistakes, it'll be okay," my mother said as she eyed the black-cat-shaped clock hanging on the wall. It was half-past 1955.

"But Mama, the eraser leaves smudges on my paper."

"It's almost ten o'clock. Sister Lucille won't mind."

Tears welled up in my eyes. I didn't care if my teacher minded, I minded.

"Come on, Joycie. You are almost done."

I ripped a new page out of my Big Chief tablet and laboriously printed my name at the top.

"What's wrong with her?" My mother asked my father as I chewed my tongue and copied my homework over one more time.

"She's tense," he said with a cigar clenched tightly in his teeth.

"The teachers will think we are pressuring her." My mother wrung her hands. "The neighbors will think we are bad parents."

"She didn't get that from me." Daddy tossed back a nerve pill and chased it with a cup of black coffee.

It was no better when I got older. In high school biology, I froze over my fetal pig with scalpel in hand.

"Come on, Joyce. I don't want to be here all afternoon." My lab partner ground his teeth.

"I'm considering my options," I told him.

"What options?"

"I don't want it to look messy."

"It's a dead pig."

"How do you uncut something after you make the first slice?"

"Just do it."

Then there was the time in thermodynamics when I was about to hand my blue book to the professor. Just as he reached out for it, I jerked it back to triple check the last question. He sighed. I sat down and reworked the problem. The answer was the same. I walked to the front of the room and handed it to him again. Once again, his fingers closed on thin air as I realized that I'd used the wrong constant in problem number three. I sat back down and quadruple checked the whole exam. Reassured, I got up again.

The professor peered at me over his glasses. "Ms. Faulkner, are you sure this time?"

"Of course."

He reached for the paper.

"Uh, maybe I should look it over one more time."

Of course, worrying about making a mistake and dealing with having made one are two different things. I was driving in the right lane on a one-way stretch of Penn Avenue a while back - and while in the midst of a convoluted thought, I forgot that it was one-way and made a left hand turn. Boom. I hit an aged coupe speeding past me in the left lane. It took the man driving it awhile to stop. I coasted on into the side street and jumped out of the Acura to see if he was okay.

"What the %@#%$^% were you thinking of?" He screamed as he met me at the corner."

"I'm so sorry," I sobbed. "Are you all right?"

"Look at my car!"

A dog pressed its nose against the inside of the window above a dent that stretched from the passenger door to the back fender.

"Oh, Mister! Is your dog okay?"

"Didn't even look."

In fact, I hadn't looked behind me. I leaned against a light post and took deep breaths. The enormity of this mistake made me nauseous.

"I thought I was on a two-way road." The explanation sounded lame even to me.

"Then you should have signaled."

"I did." I pointed to the barely scratched Acura. The left turn signal was still blinking.

"Oh." His tone softened and his shoulders slumped. "I never saw it."

"You never thought someone would make a left hand turn from the right lane on a one way street," I said soothingly.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have been going so fast."

"It's okay," I said with tears running down my cheeks.

"There, there," he said and gave me a hug, "It's just a car."

Then there was the time that I moved my husband's chair to vacuum under it a second before he sat down - and then, recognizing my mistake, tried to get it under him before he fell - and then jerked it away again because I thought it would hurt more to fall on a chair than on the carpeting.

Actually, I'm not tense - everyone else is.