Imagine my chagrin. I am leafing through a collection of my essays, which I plan to publish, looking casually for typos and points of style and grammar. Suddenly, an error leaps off the page and grabs me by the brain stem.

I have written “it’s” where I should have written “its”! This egregious bit of punctuational malfeasance has been published on my blog, for at least a year. I shudder to think that people who noticed (which are probably, I concede, only a few) might think I don’t know any better. I wonder if I wrote it correctly, and the stupid word-processor-program-that-will-remain-nameless pompously “corrected” it for me without my noticing. . .

I get it. Many people don’t really care about niceties such as this. But you are talking (listening?) to a woman who carries a small kit in her car, consisting of blue spray paint, painter’s tape, a small bottle of gold leaf paint, paint thinner, and a stencil for the purpose of correcting a certain breed of roadside sign that appears all over my island.

OK, I started this digression, so I better see it through. The sign in question is beautiful, provided for the purpose of encouraging recreation of our island. Only problem is, the headline, in suggesting modes of travel around the island, says in huge letters: “Paddle. Hike. Peddle.” Extra credit if you can tell me what is wrong with that. I have exhausted all official channels in my efforts to have it replaced; and thus I have taken the law into my own hands. It is possible that I may yet wind up as the embodiment of the cartoon about a crazy old lady who is arrested for vandalizing public property.

Anyway. I know, unequivocally, when to use “it’s” and when to use “its.”

I am reminded of a book I put together for my family, which I exhaustively scanned for errors, and recruited family members to do the same. And then, after it was all completed, and I had received the box of the copies I planned to give as gifts, I flipped through and found a mistake on the very first page.

The other day I was rambling about this issue to my Elder Son, lamenting the idea that my book might make it to the printing press with one or more undiscovered errors. Son was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Mom, did you know that there are government guidelines for how much rat poop there can be in wheat?”

Well, truth be told, my friends, I did not know that. Elder Son elaborated further, telling me that the FDA folks are smart enough to know that where there is wheat there will be rats, and we can never fully separate the two. And reminding me that nobody would be so gauche as to think that said FDA folks don’t know that having rat poop in your food is less than ideal.

So, I am scouring my manuscript, and enlisting others to do the same. But if an error gets through, so be it. I’m still way more smarter than that dumb word processing program.

Ha ha! See what I did there?