Things have been going so well that there’s almost an odd relief in losing my phone, although the timing is less than ideal. If you see it, send it home, but I suspect I will never see it again. And I am sad that the young woman at the restaurant was not charmed when I tried to describe to her the wonderful photo that would have popped up, should she find it. (I’ll put that on the Facebook link when I’m finished here.)
But the loss of the phone got me thinking: Why, when we lose things, do we say we forgot them? I never forgot my phone. True, it wasn’t uppermost in my thoughts in what was, after all, the 18th or 19th hour of a very long day. But isn’t that healthier?
I hate losing things. Of course, you’re thinking, everyone does. Let me be clear: I REALLY hate losing things. I castigate myself, I find it hard to sleep. I slept perhaps two hours, tops, last night, which is not the best preparation for flying to Florida, doing a book-signing, then driving up to Georgia where I have another event Monday.
Inevitably, my thoughts went to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, which I thought was called The Art of Losing. But, of course, I was wrong.
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)
I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Now the art of winning . . . that’s much harder to master.
I lost a brooch once, or thought I did. It was my grandmother’s, three seed pearls set in intertwining bars of gold. I couldn’t bear to tell anyone that it was gone.
Three years and two moves later, I opened an old picnic basket I use as a sewing catchall and began sorting the things in it. There, stuck to the side, was the pin.
Ever found something you thought was lost to you forever?
Have you tried calling your phone?
Yes, Barbara, and nothing happened. So I’ve deactivated it.
Travelling in Texas 2 years ago, near Houston (can’t remember the specific town we were in, but it was just over a bridge, on the way to NASA’s Johnson Space Center) I lost our digital camera.
Or maybe I lost it in Baytown, where we were staying; but we stopped for gas at the place over the bridge on the way to NASA (maybe Kemah?), and I could have lost it there. Anyway, when we got to JSC, it was gone.
And the thing is – if someone found it and wanted to keep it, I’d have traded them the camera for the pictures inside. We had lots of pics of family and the new grand daughter and the battleship Texas (very neat to tour) and San Jacinto battlefield…but it was well and truly lost.
When we bought a new camera just like the old one (a Kodak easy-share with 10X zoom; very easy to use, indeed), the first thing we did was put a note into the carrying case offering a reward for its return, no questions asked, should anyone ever find it on a parking lot (for example)
As for lost things found – many years ago a friend and I went to the movies in a car I had just bought, and for which I had exactly one set of keys. When we got to the movies, the keys slipped from my hand and tumbled into oblivion!
No kidding – we ended up finding all sorts of odds and ends, as we rooted around in that parking lot (the car was a ’72 Cutlass, and the year must have been 1980 or so) – pocket change, a comb, pens and pencils, things that looked like tic tacs (that was the hope, anyway) – but no keys.
Ended up costing me $35 to have a locksmith come out and make me a replacement key (I remember the $35 specifically – one only shudders at what such a sevice would cost in 2009!).
I recall continuing the search the next day; afterall, they had to be somewhere, right? Failing to find them, the thought was maybe somehow during the previous evening they made it out of the car – whether trapped in clothing, or whatever.
And – no kidding – three or four years later, I braked a little more sharply than usual for whatever reason – and something clinked forward at my feet…and it was the long lost keys.
I picked them up off the floorboard and looked at them, and I was genuinely taken aback. (first thing I thought was “$35!”)
Two lost items stories:
My mother just told me this memory two weeks ago and I do not think that I had ever heard it before. She is 77 and I am 51. The first winter of their marriage in late 1955, my parents were driving from southern Connecticut up to Boston for a wedding. A huge unexpected blizzard hit Massachusetts and hundreds of people, including them, were stranded on the turnpike. The snow was so deep that the cars could only inch forward from time to time, and the roads couldn’t yet be plowed. At some point my mother opened the car door. A while later she discovered that her purse (her money, her keys, all her essentials!) was gone. The traffic was at another standstill, so my father got out of the car on the turnpike and trudged back to see if he could find the purse in the snow, however impossible it seemed to be. After he got a ways, a truck driver rolled down his window and shouted out “What are you looking for?” “My wife dropped her purse.” The truck driver motioned him over and handed my father the purse. The driver had seen it lying in the snow and rescued it, apparently hoping to return it eventually. My father returned to the car and handed the purse to my amazed mother. They did eventually make it to Boston in time for the wedding but the trip took them 24 hours.
On the Sunday evening that I returned from the most recent Bouchercon in Baltimore my home phone rang. While I usually screen calls, I picked up on the 2nd ring and a man said that he had found a cell phone on the train to Boston and that mine was the last number called on it. Did I know whose cell phone it was? It was mine! (I had called my home phone to check the messages on my answering machine which is why my number was showing on the called numbers list.) I didn’t even realize that the phone was gone as I used it only for emergencies and, in this case, for the time in Baltimore to find people and make plans during the conference. The man was a conductor on the train and he said he would leave it at the New Haven railroad station for me to pick up the next day. I couldn’t believe the luck of having something found that I didn’t even realize was lost. And when I would have realized it was lost, I would never have thought where it had been lost.
So, Laura, two happy endings. I wish you the same for your phone.
I lost my best friend from high school a year after we gratduated. 15 years later we found each other and she is back in my life. That story is a huge consolation when I think about all the other things and people that are still “out there,” but gone from my life forever.