Losing It. . . Again!

My cell phone has been missing for three days.  This time.

So if my sister is calling to see how I'm managing with the problem I called to cry on her shoulder about on Sunday, she isn't getting through.

And if the library wants me to come pick up a book I ordered, I don't know about it.

And if I want to call my mom to reinforce the cell phone training we did last week--which I do--I CAN'T because the only place I recorded her cell phone number is IN MY PHONE!   Aaaarrrggggghhhhhhh!

Publisher's Clearinghouse can't notify me of winnings, publishing houses can't reach me to beg for my half-finished novel, life is passing me by.  But not my phone.  It knows who's calling.  It's storing the texts and the voice mail.

Clearly, the thing has legs.  And no conscience.

Clearly, I have a problem.

The men in my life don't seem to experience this major life dilemma with anywhere near the frequency that it befalls me.  I think it's because of the reliability of pockets in men's pants.  And the lack of purses.  And, I admit it, my own gypsy nature.  There are just too many places where I non-routinely stash the stupid thing, and too many places where I use it, and hence too many locations to toss when it goes AWOL.

I've reached the phase of phone-disappearance where I'm about to move from the desultory searching mode, which followed the initial frantic pursuit, into the more laissez-faire approach.  Phone?  What phone?  Did I used to have a phone?  What was I doing with such a thing?  Eventually, if the past is any predictor, this will conclude with serendipitous discovery.  Oh look, a phone.  Wow, it has pictures of familiar people, an address book of names I know, and some of my favorite music!

Until then, I guess it's just me and the land line.  And the few numbers I can still remember.

Blogger's Autosave Ate My Blog Draft. . .

. . . when I hit "Publish," after two hours of writing.  And my post-triathlon brain fog prohibits rewriting tonight.  Procrastinating 101 tomorrow.

Clutter's Little Blessings

Having family living in the New Orleans area for the past nineteen years has enriched my life in many ways.  (And yeah, there's all that other post-Katrina stuff, but we're not going there this morning.)  Not the least of my souvenirs from dozens of trips to the Big Easy are the exotic additions to my vocabulary--like beignet, and cafe au lait, and "Laissez le Bon temp rouler."   Like lagniape.  


Lagniappe is a regular Friday entertainment section in the Times Picayune, New Orleans' main daily newspaper.  It is also a word with a literary pedigree.  One online source reproduced a portion of a scholarly treatise from 1939 which quoted Mark Twain's discourse on the word in his 1883 publication, Life on the Mississippi, which I confess to having missed before today.  Twain's understanding is true to the first of the definitions above, deriving from the practice of shopkeepers demonstrating good will by throwing in something extra.  The proverbial thirteenth donut in a baker's dozen is the most frequently given example of this usage.  


As I have heard it used, its meaning has broadened to include any unexpected good thing.  Life's happy little surprises.  A sunny day in winter.  A chance meeting with an old friend.  The last free seat on the streetcar.  Things that bring a sudden smile, a lightness to our hearts.


Not something you would generally associate with clutter, particularly in this era of clean sweeps and downsizing, where clutter is a dirty word.  But something I have experienced, all the same, as a result of my less-than-orderly housekeeping.


I might also use the word "findings" to describe what I'm talking about.  Not the results of painstaking research efforts.  Not the gold and silver clasps and hooks and jump rings prized by beaders.  But literal locating of things misplaced, thought lost.  Things that surface serendipitously, and change the course of a day, a task, a relationship.  


Examples that come to mind would include letters from my dead father that occasionally drift into sight; a wedding ring from a previous marriage stirred from the bottom of a drawer while looking for something else; a picture of my boys as charming toddlers, left as a bookmark in a seldom-consulted volume.  The kind of things that take us back to old feelings, and remind us of things we meant to remember.  


The items I come across are not limited to the nostalgic.  Sometimes I find something truly useful, or needed, long after I have stopped searching.  Like one of a pair of earrings.  Or a missing screw, a long-overdue library book, or just the very tool to facilitate a repair I'm attempting.  Lagniappe.


It's a little like off-label prescribing, which results when we find therapeutic uses for treatments intended for other ailments.  A beneficial accident.  


I agree that sloppiness is probably not prescribed in any circumstance.  And maybe this is just my way of justifying bad habits, though I am not complacent about the chaos of my surroundings, and continue to intend to do better.  But in the meantime, I appreciate the gifts that come to me from an environment salted with memories and good fortune.

Has Anyone Seen My Head?

It’s funny, the words and phrases that stick in our heads.  Like my grandmother’s depiction of her own Irish grandfather who spent much of his last years “sarchin’” for things in various rooms and realms of the house she grew up in.  I have often thought that his preoccupation with things missing or lost is in my bones, a hereditary affliction.

I have spent way too much of my life “sarchin’” for things.  And we’re not talking some lofty spiritual quest here, as in my adopted religion’s 4th principle, which "affirm[s] and promote[s]…[a] free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”  No, my concern is rooted firmly in the mundane and worldly hunt for misplaced possessions.  I don’t want to say I’m a loser, but I have to admit that waayyyy too many of the allotted hours of my life have been taken up in tossing my environs, desperately seeking stuff. 

Yesterday, I listed on a post-it all the things I was currently trying to find.  The list included my iPod, needed to distract myself from the discomfort of 5K training; the tax-relevant receipt for the piano we purchased last year from a school; my warm winter hat, which matches the scarf I found a couple of weeks ago at Goodwill; my son’s wallet (perhaps he, too, has inherited the loser gene); a meditation audiobook, now overdue at the library; my poetry notebook; and our favorite Charlie Brown Christmas CD.  And those were just the things I could remember. 

Before the day was out, I had located both my iPod and the overdue audiobook.  I’m not sure if that was coincidental to having written them down earlier.  I’m thinking maybe the act of making a discrete list was in some way akin to issuing an All Points Bulletin in my consciousness.  In both cases, the articles were found in likely locations that I had neglected to check in my earlier reconnaissance efforts.  It remains to be seen whether the other items on my list will turn up.

I don’t know that this problem of misplacing things is getting worse as I age.  I remember in fifth grade being made to write an essay about what would happen to the world if everyone lost and forgot things like I did.  Library books were, even then, my bugaboo.  I recall stretching to apply the lesson to firefighters—what if they misplaced their hose?  their axes?—and doctors, like my father—what if they couldn’t find their stethoscopes?  their tongue depressors?  or, God forbid, their hypodermic needles?  I remember, too, at around that time and earlier, struggling to locate disappearing homework that I really had completed—no dogs involved.  So apparently I started down this road at a fairly young age.

Now that I think about it, though, I was never entirely sure if my grandmother was describing a disorganized man, like so many others in my family, or one who was increasingly “lost” himself.  I cling to the reality that, at this stage anyway, I am missing actual objects--as though that is any kind of distinction.   Even if my constant rummaging is focused on physical items that truly exist, rather than the arguably worse situation of mental disorientation, it is taking time and energy that could probably be better spent.  But what to do about it? 

As a student of Buddhism, I could disavow the attachment to material items and their uses, and mute at least the emotion that accompanies these dislocations.  Less stressing would be good.  


As a not-so-stellar student of organization, I could go the “everything in its place” route--if I could just figure out the places for all these things that keep finding their way into my life.  Where exactly does one keep the mounds of receipts spawned by daily transactions, mostly not needed at all—unless they are suddenly, unexpectedly and desperately necessary?  Or the ill-fitting cover to the battery compartment of the temporarily AWOL remote?  Or the business cards for the business I sort of started last year and may want to revive?

It seems at least part of my difficulty is having too much stuff.  Here, I guess, is where Throw Out 50 Things should come in.  I did learn some things from reading the book a week or so ago, but not as much as I could learn by actually trying to apply its approach.  So the thing to do, clearly, is to get cracking and start discarding.  Now if I can just find the book and see where to start.

I think I’ll try offering a bounty.  It’s worked before.