Lost Things

I would like to say that I have begun to lose things but that would be a lie.  I have always lost things - now I lose more things with a much greater frequency.  I've tried to analyze this trait, to understand it better,  but I really gets nowhere.  Maybe I'm distracted; I'm crazy; I'm ADHD; I'm getting old, and it's going to do nothing but get worse.

I lose so many things that I've had to create a category of Things Which Must Not Be Lost.  These things are important or irreplaceable or expensive or a combination of all three.  Things in this category have gained admission to a new category: Things Which May Only Be Put In Certain Places.  This all started with watches.  I have a couple of watches and I was always misplacing them.  One day I went out into the back yard to do some yoga.  The watch was hindering my fluid movements - as fluid as a svelte Swedish pre-teen - so I decided to put the watch in the toe of one of my shoes; inside the shoe because that was the stupidest place I could come up with.   When I was done I took my shoes and my yoga mat back inside.  Sometime later I noticed the watch was missing.  I had NO idea where it was.  Because this was the nicer of my watches finding it wasn't something that could be put off until later.  Any of the fleeting thought processes that might help me retrieve the watch were ebbing quickly.   Of course, I blamed SuperK for the lost watch so that I could guilt her into helping me search.  We looked for a long, long time before I remembered where the watch was.  She still tells people that story when she's mad at me.  Now I am permitted to put my watch in one of three places: my desk, my watch drawer, and I can't remember what the third place is.

The next things to earn their own category were my two mouth guards.  I grind my teeth when I sleep - apparently I'm not able to relax even when I'm unconscious.  These aren't the wussy plastic things that pro football or hockey players wear - this is a $650 custom piece of composite plastic that you could literally run a Mack truck over without harming it.  Now you'd probably think that something that was in my mouth all night would go right under the faucet but you'd be thinking wrong.  I put them everywhere.  They are on the List.

Lately I've been losing sunglasses.  I used to wear sunglasses all the time because my contact lenses made my eyes particularly sensitive to light.  Now that I'm old I can't see anything anyhow so I'm always hooking my sunglasses on my shirt or putting them on top of my head so I can walk around asking: "Has anyone seen my sunglasses?"  

A pair took a hike this week and they were actually AWOL for a couple of days.  I had written them off.   I went out to the car this morning to get something out of the trunk.  I opened the lid and stood there for a moment - I had forgotten what I wanted to get.  I looked down and saw the wayward sunglasses - I had put them in a narrow ridge that seats the trunk lid.  Somehow, some way, when the trunk was closed the mechanism pivoted so that the glasses, still in that narrow ridge, weren't crushed.  I had no recollection of putting them there.

The question I had to ask myself was this: why would I have put something breakable in a place where they were certain to be broken?  It would have made more sense to lay them down directly under the front wheels of the car.  

Nothing.  I had nothing to say.