The Absentminded Mail

I'm getting old. My hair is thinning, especially in the back, and in a three-way mirror I can see the spot where I'll likely be bald before I reach 40. I get odd aches and pains, occasionally a sharp stab behind a shoulder blade or a shin, that leave as quickly as they appear with no explanation. And after 33 years of a sharp memory, I'm starting to lose track of important things.

Take the mail, for example. In her 69 years, my mom has always been very efficient with paperwork. She sorts mail immediately, weeds out junk mail, and writes the date received on every piece that comes into this house. There's a basket in our hallway where my mail accumulates, and each night when I get home from work, I always take the important stuff. I consider bank statements, credit card bills, and Netflix to be important. Things I ignore and eventually trash every month or so include letters from my old high school or college asking for a donation, junk mail from my old company asking me to buy books, coupons that I might have used if I saw them before their expiration date, stock prospectuses and various advertisements for gyms, singles services, insurance, and more. The red envelope with my latest Netflix DVD usually outshines everything else in the pile, except for that credit card bill.

I've been very consistent in the five years or so that I've actually had a card. I had one friend end up over $20,000 in debt. I have an uncle that currently puts his bills in a drawer and complains to my other uncle that they keep sending him these things. As I learned when I watched Maxed Out last year, credit card companies love these people. They keep sending bills and accruing interest. My uncle keeps forgetting to pay his bills because he's starting to get senile, yet the same company also sent him a new card and said he was approved. They love to let people dig deep holes. They go for the very old. They go for the very young. The documentary I watched noted how easy it is for college kids to get a card, and interviewed parents whose children ultimately committed suicide when they got that far in debt. Most of the people I know my age with debt started when they were in college.

So, by my mid to late 20s I had a card, and I've always paid in full immediately. When I get a bill, the check is in the mail the next morning, unless I get that bill on a Saturday, in which case I mail the check the same morning. I've never faltered, never missed a payment, so I was certain my bill this Saturday was in error when it showed a late fee. I don't always look too closely at the individual charges, but when the total was twice as high as I normally spend, I knew something was wrong.

Did I forget to mail the last check? I raced to the kitchen and checked our outgoing mail. It wasn't there. I found my checkbook, and saw that I had written down a payment in early January. I found a statement from my bank the corroborated, and thought for sure it was a mistake. Then I remembered it was now March. February went by in the blink of an eye, and I couldn't remember if I wrote a check at the beginning of the month.

It's been a few weeks since I've gone through my finances, tallying various bank statements and paychecks to see how close I'm getting to various goals. I usually do that every two weeks, but paperwork had piled up. There was no sign of a credit card bill though in any of my financial papers, and I began holding on to the hope that they'd never sent it. I had no idea how I could prove that, but even if I still had to pay the late fee and accept a higher interest rate, I'd feel better that someone else made the mistake, that I wasn't losing my mind.

My father suggested I go through the basket in the hallway. I thought I'd weeded through that already, but there was a significant pile of newsletters and other bits of junk mail, more than I expected. I guess I haven't done more than skim the good stuff from the top in a while. I went through piece by piece, confident I wouldn't find it, until I found it.

There it was, my monthly statement and bill, sealed and untouched, save for a little “1/31” where my mom had written the date received. I never opened it, and it sat there until 2/13 when payment was due, and then for another two weeks until I got my next bill. They were right; I was wrong. After a streak of consistency, I was beginning to get absent-minded. Once, after the first year I had the card, I wrote a check in January but inadvertently put the previous year. I'd been perfect since then, so my streak was bound to come to an end. I had to pay the fee, had to have my rate go up 1%. I thought there was a higher additional fee when I saw a charge next to an acronym I didn't recognize, but then remembered it was a charity donation to a “Brain Tumor Foundation” and not a “Balance Transfer Fee”.

Even my parents were skeptical, but couldn't deny the evidence of that sealed piece of month-old mail. My mom checked the calendar, to see if it arrived on an odd day of the week. We couldn't figure out why a Thursday would be different from any other, why my mind would be elsewhere. Then we figured it out. That was the night we rushed our sick cat to the hospital. I didn't come home from work, but raced to meet my parents in a parking lot halfway so we could drive out there together since my dad doesn't see as well at night. We didn't get home for hours, and even missed the season premiere of Lost. My cat was still very ill the next day, and I stayed up with him a good portion of the night. I was distracted, my mom was distracted, and in the hallway new mail continued to accumulate on top of the old.

The mystery was solved. Going forward, losing my mind or not, I should make it a regular habit to go through that pile at least once a week. “You cost me 40 bucks,” I said my frisky friend, as he darted past batting around a straw my mom had taken home from the hospital. “He cost me a bit more than that, that night,” my mom reminded me. And in both instances, we can't say it wasn't worth it.