Taking A Stand: Misplacing things can get annoying
Is there anything more irritating in the world, aside from my weekly column, than to put something down and forget where you put it?
We’ve all done it at one time or another. We put something away, seemingly in a place where it would be easy to remember, and then it gets lost. These items can range from keys and wallets to priceless family heirlooms. And, think as hard as we will, no amount of mental concentration will lead you back to where the item is.
Of course, we, as rational humans, take this inability of our memory banks to find our lost stuff very personally. First, we get mad, kind of looking around the most obvious places our lost item would be. However, if it were in an obvious place, it wouldn’t be lost, would it?
“Where did I lay that,” you ask yourself out loud.
Then, if it’s an important thing like keys, a wallet or dare I say, the remote control, then you start your panic period where you start turning stuff upside down, chucking sofa cushions and slinging open drawers, all the time criticizing your own brain for letting you down.
“I just had that in my hand,” you say, your eyes flashing back and forth.
Then, invariably, once your panic has yielded no success and the room looks like a cyclone has hit it, the part of your brain which represents the reasonable man or woman kicks in and these exact words come out of your mouth – “OK, let’s think about this.”
Now comes the interesting phase of the search, the stuff that would be priceless if it were caught on video. Now we go into “re-tracing steps” as we become amateur sleuths like some southern version of Nancy Drew. This phase of the search is similar to reenacting the crime like they did on “Perry Mason,” “Columbo” or even “Gilligan’s Island” the time they thought one of the castaways was a spear gun murderer.
Of course, we soon realize how incredibly hard it is to remember your actions of just minutes or hours ago when you first mislaid the object. You start wondering if there’s something wrong with your brain.
“Maybe I had a mini-stroke,” you wonder.
And, most hilarious of all is how people re-trace their steps. Instead of walking normally, folks re-tracing their steps always do an exaggerated walk, almost slow motion as if they are doing a replay of a big catch on Monday Night Football, looking at it from all angles.
“Now I was here and then I went over there,” you tell yourself just before you scratch your head like a scalp massage will relax your brain.
Make no mistake, people will go to the far ends of the Earth during the investigative stage. I’ve found myself going back and forth to the office twice in an evening looking for a wallet. And face it, a wallet is the worst loss because you keep getting this vision of some punk sitting in a strip club somewhere buying rounds for the crowd using your credit card. Plus, you’ve got all your stuff in there, stuff that would be a pain to replace, so, you can justify pulling out all the stops to find your lost possession.
And then, finally, there comes the time when you just got to let go, to move on with your life. When all else fails, it’s time to cancel those cards and go to the driver’s license station for a new mug shot, likely worse than the old one because you’ve been aged years in your unsuccessful search.
I feel there will be a reckoning; however, when you move to the next life. The first stop, I believe, will be the lost and found where St. Peter will at last display your wallet or what ever and exclaim the words, “Were you looking for this?”
(Duane Sherrill is a reporter for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)