Sometimes you gotta wonder about the child. Yes, I�m muttering about Kat. Here�s a child who taught herself to read at the age of three, remembers the words to every song she was ever taught in kindergarten, is a National Merit Semifinalist yet cannot seem to remember the most ordinary things. Today, for example, she could not find the clean sheets for her bed. Mind you, we have lived in this house since she was eight months old and the linen closet has not moved. Mind you, she knew where the sheets were when she was three or four and voluntarily helped me around the house. But today the key question on her mind was �where do you keep my sheets?�

I can hear my father musing now. �She�s not ditzy,� he�d say if he were watching. �She�s creatively incompetent.� He would remind me that this teen is the same one who during our vacation last summer pretended not to know what a casserole dish was. I was just about to buy that explanation when I realized that the sheets were not the only thing she was missing. She was missing some things she actually wanted too.

She had bought a book, a wonderfully funny book, for one of the children she babysits for. This five-year-old, the youngest of three terrific kids, is home recovering from a stroke. Kat was on her way over and she wanted me to remind her how to get there. (She�s been there several times before but they do live in a tricky area.) I asked her to give me the address so I could show her on the map. There was a delay while she located what she had done with their address and phone number. She had used the synagogue directory to call over there but that was earlier in the weekend. Kat, being Kat, had dropped it somewhere. (The somewhere turned out to be the piano bench which is not near any phone but sometimes logic has nothing to do with anything.)

I could chalk that one up to nervousness about seeing the child but I don�t think she really was nervous. It was the next �missing� item that got me. She decided that she wanted to take the girls� cell phone just in case she got lost in the subdivision. She was thinking that it would make more sense to call the family than me if she got lost there (and she was right about that one.) But she couldn�t find the cell phone. She had no idea where to look�and it was right where it belonged: in the cell phone box in the kitchen. I gave her a clue. I reminded her that the cell phone was supposed to be kept in the kitchen. �No one told me,� she retorted. (We did and she saw me put it there the first time.)

And then there is her internship where her interim report shows she is currently getting a �D� for ditz. Her last class of the day is community internship. To get a good grade in her internship, all she needs to do is show up at the kindergarten she helps with (which she does faithfully), get in a weekly time sheet on time (which she has trouble getting in late), and make it to weekly meetings with the teacher (which she doesn�t do because, according to her, �I can�t remember when Wednesday is.�) I would say that any child who loses a college scholarship for failing to pass community internship deserves it but I�m afraid it would hurt me more than it would hurt her.

ARRGH! I�ve given birth to a child who should be filed under �D� for �ditz.� The problem is that I�d never find her under �D.� She wouldn�t be there. She�d be sitting facing the cabinet and asking whether we moved it.

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