Saturday, May 14, 2005

Here at the Lost and Found...

It really is amazing the stuff you find while you're looking for other stuff. Or when you're not looking for anything at all.
A couple of weeks back, trying to locate the manuals for our high speed internet service to transfer it to our new computer, I was forever stumbling on things that had been misplaced for months. Like the first volume of Spangle, by Gary Jennings--one of my favourite novels, and it's almost time to re-read it again! Alas, the other two volumes are still counted among the missing.
(Try as we might to keep the books in this place in some semblance of order, the sad fact is that they migrate all over the damn place, until finding a specific tome might take longer than reading it.)
Or you find things you didn't even know were missing. Pictures, cards, a pair of socks, about thirty pens, the commemorative Y2K pin I got from 7-Eleven for working New Year's Eve, 1999-2000.
Today, Eva's brother, Jim, came over to help us move a few things. Yeah, I can carry bookshelves up two flights of stairs on my own, but my heel is apt to speak up halfway through the proceedings and demand help.
Besides, there were other things to move. Like a couch. I've written of this monstrosity before: the starburst-on-black braincramp that squatted in our last three living rooms. Now you can add "wet" to the list of uncomplimentary adjectives describing this sofa. It's sitting out on the lawn, looking lost and lonely and so damn ugly it's likely to remain that way.
Anyway, as we picked up this couch to move it, we heard a few things clunking around deep in the works. We had to cut the bottom lining to gain a handhold to move it, whereupon those few things revealed themselves...

  • Two houses and nearly four years ago, we receieved a letter from an old friend of Eva's, someone she'd lost contact with years before. Before she could answer this letter, it vanished. Now here it was.
  • Sixty loads of laundry and almost eight months ago, another pair in an endless line of black MacGregor HappyFeet (the most comfortable socks on the planet) disappeared. Don't ask me how they ended up inside the couch.
  • So long ago it's almost lost to memory, I lost a wallet for the nth time in my life. I swore up and down that it had never left the house. Nobody believed me. No money was lost (does anybody ever carrry cash dollars around any more?), but we did have to replace all the identification. Both before and after doing so, I tore the house apart, convinced the wallet would turn up on the very day the last card came through in the mail. It never did. Because while I dug around in the couch at least twice, I never considered actually dismantling it. So that wallet came through two moves with us...hidden deep within a black hole.
Why is it I never find money on these excursions?

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