My family has a chronic case of "lost then found."
We always think we are losing things. Sometimes we do, but more often than not, the object is lost then found.
More than 50 years ago, my grandfather's false teeth went missing. He had spent the night at our house and removed his dentures before retiring. In the morning, he could not find them. We looked under the beds, beneath the dressers, in a drinking glass on the sink. The bed was stripped of its sheets, and his teeth were nowhere to be found.
My mother asked my sister, age five at the time, "Baby, have you seen Papa's teeth?"
She and I often played a game of hiding things, but we had not played it the previous night. Still, my mother asked, because she, the quiet child, had taken to making her presence known by hiding small family possessions. The previous summer, she had hidden my sweater under a mattress in New Hampshire, just before we were supposed to go out for dinner.
This time, when she was asked about the false teeth, she had no recollection. Our grandfather had another plate made. That was winter of 1959. He died in the fall of 1961. Some years after his death, his teeth were found inside of an empty Valentine candy box on the third floor. My sister at last remembered that she had hidden them.
"I didn't want him to go home," she explained.
These days, we have endless searches for rings, earrings and glasses. Lost items are not limited to Baltimore. Last month, I was visiting my niece and nephew in New York. As I fished through my purse to find my wallet, my niece whispered, "I just had an episode."
The night before, she had worn the scarf her brother brought her from Italy. On Saturday morning, she could not find the patterned blue scarf in her tiny apartment. She searched her coat sleeves, the sofa, her bed and closet. She texted every friend who had been out with her. She called the places they had been and the cab companies they had used. She went online to see if she could find a replacement.
Seeing the same scarf still available brought some relief. Exhausted, she climbed back in bed for a few more minutes of sleep. Before she closed her eyes, she saw something sticking out behind her clothes hamper. She thought she was dreaming, but there was her scarf. She jumped out of bed, grabbed it and kissed it!
Many times I have done the same thing.
Rarely, however, does my husband lose anything. In December, I came home late one evening. He greeted me at the door with the news that he had accidently flushed his sock down the toilet. What? Was he delirious? (He was sick at the time.) How could he have flushed a sock down the toilet? He reenacted how he had hung his clothes on a bathroom hook, then later taken them off the hook and turned out the light.
Possibly, he said, the sock had dropped in the toilet, and he had not seen it on a later visit. Impossible, I thought. But he was still sure the missing sock would soon clog our pipes and the city sewer line. He filled the bathtub with water twice and emptied it. The water drained well.
To check with an expert, I called our plumber, who actually answered the phone at 10 p.m. He said that if the water drained fast, the lines were clear. Sail on, green sock!
A month later, while removing Christmas candles from the windows, I pulled out an extension cord from under the bed. With it came a bright green sock. Had he lost a sock in the laundry, I asked my husband. No, it was the "flushed" sock. Too bad he had already thrown away its mate.
Just after the sock incident, my nephew went skiing and lost his wallet. He did not realize it until he returned to his hotel and had neither the room key nor his wallet. He went back to a spot where he had fallen, dug through the snow and found only the key. Six weeks later, he received his wallet in the mail. Everything was intact: his credit card, his license and all $360 in cash.
Over the years, everyone in the family has lost some valuables, but somehow, it is the things we've found that we remember most.