It's A Wonderful Life

This morning my wife demanded to know where I had put the deposit slip for church funds she had had me deposit last week.

"On the kitchen counter," I said. "I always put it on the counter."

Obviously it was not there, yet and still I was certain I had put it there. Where else would I have put it? I always put it on the counter. I figure if actual memory no longer serves me, habit on its own is certain to do so (creature of habit that I am).

"Will you keep looking for it? she said, then gave me the deposit for the current week.

I had of course no intention of continuing to look for what I already knew had been placed on the counter, just as it always is. Normal people can forget stuff too, right? Normal people can misplace things, lose things, accidentally discard important documents, even money.

I know what I know. I said what I said.

Well, it turned out that the reason the receipt was missing was that there was no receipt, for you see the money had never been deposited. Rather, I found it, along with the deposits slips, in my glove compartment. This was predictable enough, given my recent history--and yet still managed to be absolutely surprising to me.

How could this money have been sitting in my car for a week? Other people's money, church money, God's money! Why had I been so certain that the errand had been accomplished? What was it that had convinced me not only that the money been deposited, but that the deposit slip had been placed on the kitchen counter?

My life becomes a pattern of seemingly reliable assumptions--a theory, an hypothesis. Guesswork and habit have replaced actual knowledge and deliberation. No longer able to call upon the surety of recollection, I turn to mere likelihood and the fidelity of habit.

Yesterday when I went to deposit funds of my own, I filled out the deposit slip, put my cash on the bank counter, swiped my card, punched in the pin, then returned the cash to my wallet.

"Um . . . I'm going to need that money," the teller said.

More and more, I depend on the kindness of strangers.

Remember the old film It's a Wonderful Life? Remember uncle Billy, who almost ruined George Bailey's building and loan institution? Right, that endearing though bumbling old fool with a crow on his shoulder and a squirrel in his pocket. People can put up with that kind of idiocy until it actually causes big problems, at which point exasperation becomes anger, and then anger becomes disregard and derision.

Now I am uncle Billy.

And though facts are facts, and though the verdict is in, I am still having a hard time accepting it. I do not see myself this way, and yet it begins to become clear that everyone else does. My objections are founded in a past aptitude and functionality that no longer exists, yet which continues to encompass my own sense of identity.

The rich man suddenly divested of his riches will yet for some time labor under the persistent illusion of wealth and the dignity it had endowed upon his life. So it is that I by the same token persist in the idea that I am still the man I was

Infallibility was a difficult enough standard to live up to, but constant failure is immeasurably more difficult to live down.