Oops, I Did It Again

I've been doing it as long as David has known me; heck, I've been doing it most of my life: losing important things, freaking out about lost items, pulling other people into my frenzy of searching for lost items only to find that what I thought was lost was not lost at all.

In High School I lost my orthodontic retainer, and after ransacking every inch of our house and even the tip of the dumpster outside the school cafeteria, I concluded with gusty assurance that a ghost had taken my retainer. Months later, the retainer reappeared. The ghost had given it back. By that time, it didn't fit anymore, and the effort to retain the straight smile I had when I first got my $2,000 braces taken off had failed. I always felt guilty about that because that was a lot of money coming from two teachers' salaries, and they did it times two. Daniel was the only one of the three of us that didn't get braces and he later expressed his feeling of getting ripped off: Why couldn't he have been given the $2,000 in cash? It's not like my teeth are awful now. They're pretty straight...WAY better than when I got braces. I sucked my thumb until I was eight so when my lost baby teeth came back in, many of them came back crowded and crooked. I didn't really pay much attention, but B. H., a neighborhood boy three years my senior, made sure my budding self esteem took a major hit by asking me in front of everyone, "Where'd you get your teeth...K-Mart?" The point of all this is that I lost my retainer, sent my whole family into a tizzy helping me find it, blamed it on a ghost, then found it months later.

My junior year of college, my friend A. H. and I traveled to England and Wales to visit our friend that had been an exchange student living in our dorm the year before. During that whole two-week period, both A and L had to put up with my outbursts of "MY PASSPORT! Where is it?" as I frantically frisked myself at least five times a day. I always found my passport, and A and L always knew I would. Boy was I a neurotic international traveler.

In Florida, early in our courtship, David and I often found ourselves cooling off in the local Baskin Robins. His indoctrination to my losing-things-freak-out came one afternoon when I realized I'd left my purse at the ice cream parlor. We were thirty minutes away before I noticed I couldn't find my chapstick because I COULDN'T FIND MY PURSE!! He turned the car around, raced back, and I was lucky that my purse (and chapstick) were right where I left them. I'm usually so lucky.

I cannot even count the times over the years when things like this have happened. David is so used to it, he just always calmly reminds me that I'm doing it again and that I almost always find what I think I've lost. Just two days ago, trying to get Grace to school on time, I couldn't find my keys, (To be fair, I had a special hook where I hang my keys, but an unnamed guest recently MOVED that hook because she thought it would look better in the kitchen hanging, say, decorative hand towels). Ever since, I've been hard-pressed to find my keys when I need them. The other day I raced around looking for my keys, and then looking for the spare, and caused such a racket David jumped out of his shower...

TO BE CONTINUED...CHECK BACK LATER