Mistakes

By TAD BARTIMUS

Last week I made two mistakes. One damaged my leg, the other, my pride. Each was a reminder that as we hurtle through life at breakneck speed, we are sometimes careless -- and always human.

We make errors in judgment, and mostly we get away with it -- cutting somebody off in traffic, standing on the verboten top step of the ladder "just for a minute," leaving the baby unattended in the grocery cart to get an extra quart of milk.

My mother used to say that as long as nobody died, everything could be mended. When you're a kid, it's comforting to learn that the world doesn't end if your baseball takes out the neighbor's window or the car gets dented a week after you get your license.

I'm older now. I know that embarrassment, pain and loss are not absolutes, but gradations of gray. I know that others' lives can be permanently altered by one careless act, one absent-minded mistake. After a tree fell on my friend while he was trimming it, paralyzing him from the hips down, neither his life, nor the lives of those who loved him, were the same.

I also know that ignoring the little voice in my head that warns, "Whoa! Slow down!" gets me in trouble.
I made last week's first mistake when I walked in my flip-flops too fast down the steps in the rain; now I have bad bruises and a broken fibula.

Too often, one mistake piles onto another, creating a domino effect. Right after my fall -- hurting, tired and medicated -- I failed to carefully edit a column, fouled up a paragraph and wrongly attributed a comment to former first lady Barbara Bush. I had conflated the occasion on which Bush referred to vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro as "rhymes with rich" with an incident in which the mother of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrish made a similar comment about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., when Clinton was first lady. When a reader questioned my accuracy, I was horrified to discover the error, which was mine alone.

Too late; the damage was done, both to Mrs. Bush and to my reputation. Feeling terrible doesn't fix the problem. Apologizing and immediately correcting the error helps -- many papers received a correction before they published the column. But those actions don't entirely solve the problem. Twice in one week, I was painfully reminded that I am human and vulnerable and can cause damage when I am not 100-percent focused and responsible.

I'm struck by how lucky I am, how lucky so many of us are, when we dodge real disaster. My heart goes out to those involved in the collision of the USS Greenville and the fishing vessel Ehime Maru in Hawaii, which left nine Japanese missing and the sub's crew under investigation.
I know the Army is searching for the reasons why two of its Black Hawk helicopters recently collided -- also in Hawaii -- and killed six soldiers. All over the world today, right now, accidents are happening and humans are suffering. Some will die because mistakes were made. How many could have been prevented? Hindsight is always 20/20.
My husband, who teaches sixth- and eighth-graders, left me with this thought this morning: "Every day I'm sure I make mistakes I don't even know about. I may say something that offends or upsets a child, give the students a wrong date, use a grammatically incorrect phrase. I can dwell on that, or I can focus on trying to do the best I can to protect their physical and mental health. Which seems the most productive course of action?"
I'm sure he's channeling Mom.

© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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