Socks, keys, mind - losing our favorite things
BURTON W. COLE, Editor
By Burton W. Cole
Screenwriter Neil Gaiman observed, “Nobody gets through life without losing a few things along the way.”
Songwriter Jimmy Buffett confessed — while nibblin’ on sponge cake and watchin’ the sun bake — that he was “searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt.”
Digital content writer Ashley Bailey noted, “I don’t lose things all the time. I just hide them from myself unintentionally, and then I have to go on a quest to find them. I’m like an explorer going on an adventure that I created to find my bank card.”
The point is, we all lose things, with the possible exception of weight. That’s the only thing that’s not easy to lose.
I’ve lost car keys, ink pens and phone numbers. I’ve lost socks in the dryer, money in my wallet and my place in the hymnal while leading the whole church in a song.
But the most embarrassing thing I lost was Grandma.
My family entrusted me to meet Grandma and her wheelchair at her gate at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in Ohio. That went fine. Next, I collected her luggage, not a bit of which was lost.
That reminds me of that quip I read: “I tried to sue the airport for losing my luggage. I lost my case.”
I wheeled Grandma outside, parked her at the pickup line and hustled to the parking garage to get my car.
When I swung back around, Grandma was gone. At an international airport. With flights departing to points around the world.
As the saying goes, of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most. But Grandma ranks pretty high on the list, too.
I hit panic mode. The guy in the reflective vest and badge growled at me to move my car and stop blocking the pickup zone. Flights lifted into the air.
Then, above the din of the crowd, I heard someone yell, “Here she is!”
A lady in an airport uniform weaved through the crowd at a trot, threatening to run over lollygaggers with Grandma’s wheelchair.
She found Grandma.
“She had to go to the bathroom,” the lady pushing the wheelchair hollered for all the international flyers to hear. “She had to go to the bathroom! So I took her.”
Grandma tried to get lost in a cloak of invisibility, which is hard to do when a woman in a blue uniform is ramming your big, ol’ wheelchair through milling wanderers in an airport loading zone.
I bundled Grandma into the car and only lost my way only once — okay, twice — trying to find the interstate.
Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko wrote, “What is it about us human beings that we can’t let go of lost things?”
A good philosophical question, I suppose, but I had Grandma buckled in snug in the passenger seat. I wasn’t about to lose her again.
Losing things. We all do it. Usually not a whole, entire grandmother, but we’ve all misplaced stuff.
My late wife used to ask me to call her phone while she ran around both inside and outside the house straining her ears to hear the ring. Setting her phone down and forgetting where was her favorite hobby.
I wish library books would find that feature. I just returned a book that was three months overdue. I finally found it while rooting through my little apartment in search of my watch. It was another couple of weeks before I remembered that I don’t have a watch.
I make sure to place my glasses in a designated spot at night. Otherwise, I end up pawing my way across the carpet, over counters and under chairs, a blind man searching for his lost eyes.Things — if it’s something we can have, you can be sure it’s something we’re gonna lose.
As the T-shirt writer said, “If all is not lost, where is it?”
Find Burt at news@falmouthoutlook.com — if he hasn’t misplaced his computer again.