#50 Something Vanished

For two weeks it was out of sight and A didn’t care much. Compensating for the missing __________ was easy enough. It didn’t cost a lot and it wasn’t something he couldn’t live without. It was just so strange that it was gone.

Strange. The house was generally messy and things got pushed under piles, under mail, under magazines. Clothing, dirty socks, dust bunnies accumulated and as he searched he became caught up in finding outdated LL Bean Catalogues and found himself regretting the missed sale on flannels. Before he realized it, it was time to do something else, or the phone rang or a work text came through and looking for ___________ became momentarily inconsequential.

The issue of not cleaning the house became the barrier to finding ____________.

He knew it.

He always knew it.  At 50 it never dawned on him to be embarrassed by his poor housekeeping. He was comfortable and it wasn’t until something went missing that he considered, or reconsidered, the benefits of being more organized.

On the subway home he made a deal with himself to look for it in a structured and methodical way. ‘When I get home I will take off my shoes and start to go through my closet. I will take every thing out and either find it, or rule out that it is absolutely not there. Today. Then I will move the search under the bed. I will pull every thing out and (same deal).’

When he arrived home he felt happy to be there. ‘There’s no place like home, isn’t a popular saying for nothing’, he thought.

He pulled off his shoes and sat on the couch and looked at the mail. The cat leapt onto his lap and he was warm and comfortable. He picked up the book he was almost finished reading and wanted to see how it ended.

Then he wanted to start the next book on his Kindle.

The next day he went to ______________ class and of course he still didn’t have it. He was doing just fine without it and a new one would cost around $50. He was still determined to find the one he had before spending the money on a new one.

He started to think more about it. It was about 3-years-old and even though he liked the color a lot, he thought that maybe it was starting to wear out. Wearing thin. He was starting to think about that even before it vanished, or was misplaced. He could not quite yet admit to himself that it was lost, because where could it have gone? Seriously?

After a few more _________ classes he realized that it was not returning. Never coming back. He remembered his dad telling him to always retrace his footsteps, but there were really none to retrace. The lost and found was no help.

That night, with the cat on his lap, he ordered a new one. Spending a bit of time to consider a new color and careful not to spend more on this one than the last.

It arrived in three days and he still liked the color of the old one more, but that’s it.

‘It will probably turn up eventually and I’ll feel really foolish.’ he thought. But he never felt foolish and was glad when the new one arrived. He also realized that he didn’t even need it anymore, but like an old friend, he was glad to have it around.