Get it all together

I was scrounging, unsuccessfully, through the depths of the closet looking for something I wanted to show my mom, “I know its here, I saw it last week when I organized this closet.”
My mom laughed, “You have it all together, you just didn’t know where it’s at.”
I did find the item eventually, but she was right – my brain is not quite the precision instrument I want it to be.
Take birthday cards, please. I keep them on hand only to forget to mail them out until after the person’s birthday. One year I found the perfect card for my father a couple months ahead of time. I wanted to be sure he got it so I sent it immediately.
My mother called a few days later wondering if I had forgotten the date of his birth.
“No, I saw the card and bought it. I decided if I didn’t send it right away, I would forget or lose it by the time his birthday rolled around.”
If only birthdays were like Christmas, once a year and everyone celebrates. I have no problem with Christmas cards, they are sign, sealed and sent days after Thanksgiving. But birth dates do not accommodate mass mailings. And some people really do not agree with me that if “better late than never” is true, then “better early than never” also is true.
“At least you remembered them with something,” my daughter reassured me recently as I puzzled over whether it was better to have given something and been out of step with the time, than never to have given at all. I remembered her sentiment a month after her wedding. She was home looking at wedding pictures with one of her attendants when my husband walked in carrying a child’s white shoe box with the lid. He handed it to my daughter.
“I bought this a while back to give you, but forgot about it.”
She lifted the lid to unveil a model P-T cruiser. She looked at him very puzzled.
“I know you always wanted a car and really like this kind. I bought it so I could give you the car of your dreams.”
“Oh, sure thanks,” she laughed and put the car aside.
Later that evening she and I ran across a sack from a department store with a wedding thank you gift for her dad: a T-shirt proclaiming him the best dad in the world. We didn’t have it the day she and I wrapped a heap of gifts for out-of-town guests and attendants. After we did buy it, we shoved it up on a shelf to wrap later – and forgot about it. She went out to the living room, grabbed the little shoe box, stuck the T-shirt inside it and took it out to her dad. “Thanks for everything you did for the wedding, Dad.”
He looked at the box, “I believe I’ve seen this before.”
He took out the shirt, admired the sentiment, thanked her and put the box on the coffee table.
She went back to clearing out her closet into packing boxes. A few minutes later she circled through the living room, grabbed the box again, returned and handed the shoebox to me, “Uh … thanks for everything you did for the wedding.”
Inside the shoe-gift box was a blue starred cup and red-striped saucer reminiscent of her wedding theme.
“You didn’t see this up on the shelf did you?” I assured her I had not.
We put it behind the glass door with other tea cups.
I thought that took care of everything, but last week, I came across another wedding “thank you” gift. It fit perfectly into our “Whoops, I forgot to give you this present” box. Perhaps we will actually remember to take it when we visit the recipient this weekend.