Next to kick-the-can, hide-and-seek was one of my favorite games during childhood, but as an adult both games have lost appeal.I’m not the same person who at 8 or 9 leaned against a tree trunk, with my eyes squeezed shut and hidden in the crook of my arm, to count down to one while I listened to the sound of others search for a hiding place. Now I unwillingly play the games with inanimate objects in a four-room apartment that isn’t big enough to cause the amount of frustration that accompanies frantic searches for lost things.
There are plenty of opportunities for sanity tests. Maybe it depends which side of the bed one gets out of that determines if time will pass smoothly or if it’s going to be a bumpy ride between sun-up and sundown. Maybe it matters if Mercury is in retrograde. Maybe it’s one of those signs of age I’m supposed to learn to laugh at and take in stride.
I’d like to say nothing can drive me to the brink of insanity more than losing my keys, but missing articles of clothing; not finding a matching shoe or a stray hairbrush; a checkbook that suddenly turns invisible; locating the right USB plug-in, a backscratcher, or batteries that work; and even the inability to find eyeglasses that were “just right there,” have pushed me to the edge many times.
The most commonly misplaced items are car keys, followed by a wallet or locating a car in a parking lot, coats and gloves, shoes, a checkbook and cell phones. I’ve played lost-and-found with most of those items; after all, I own 10 ice scrapers, nine Kansas maps, seven flashlights, six hats, five pairs of gloves, four backscratchers and three hairbrushes for a reason. What I don’t get is how things are staying “hidden” longer than the 30-minute panic attacks I used to have.
My ring of keys is actually a link of six, because long ago the bigger something was the harder it was to lose. Not so. A week ago Sunday this seven-inch contraption of leather and metal with a variety of miniature reward cards attached and a remote control lock/unlock-with-panic-device-feature disappeared for three hours.
Exactly when I thought I needed to be somewhere. Not more than 30 minutes prior to losing them, I had used them to open the downstairs door and enter the apartment. I couldn’t have been in the car, the building or my place without them. While I knew they weren’t still in the ignition, I still looked … five times.
They weren’t where I always toss them and the six times I emptied and reloaded the drawer was enough proof. They weren’t next to my keyboard, on top of a table where they occasionally rest on mail. They weren’t dangling from any hooks, shoved into any pockets, dropped on the floor, hidden under a newspaper, sitting on the bathroom sink, splayed out on the bed, on top of the television, in the fridge or even the trash. It was as if inanimate suddenly took a vacation.
Now professorsolomon.com says there are 12 principles to finding lost things. The first principle should be not to lose it, except it’s don’t look for it. Uh-huh. In a state of worry, concern and even panic that’s the last thing I’ll do. And while I sat idly tapping fingers on a keyboard, my hands were still straying to dark and remote spots where I thought I hadn’t looked, even though I knew they weren’t there, because undisturbed dust proved it.
Solomon says to be comfortable, calm and confident—and I was far from any of those. Demanding, yes, as if those keys had ears and would appear front and center at command. They didn’t.
Those keys weren’t where they were supposed to be and I entertained the idea of calling out, “Olly, olly oxen free,” in hopes that something would jingle and point me in their direction.
I retraced my steps until my calves hurt from climbing stairs. I mumbled over and over that I quit and even started my Christmas list, which includes five Find-It Key Finders, or a cheaper equivalent, right under saucepans.
I was ready to collapse on the couch, distract myself with television or a movie, or even fly a white flag in the window if it would help. Before doing so, I pulled off a cushion to see the ring nestled in the crack.
The question I can’t answer is how’d they get there?
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