“These things have a way of showing up,” is how my pal Sid ended his note.
He was trying to reassure me.
A recently retired surgeon, smart and intuitive, Sid was instinctively responding to what he recognized as the frantic edge of what I’d hoped would sound like a casual email.
I spent an hour writing emails or phoning everybody we’d stayed with, as well every place we’d visited, dined or shopped in during a week of travels, in search of a treasured scarf I’d left behind in one of those places.
We’d stayed with Sid and Anita at the beginning of our vacation. Florida greeted us with light rain and cold days, so I was grateful for my shawl and clutched it to me the way Linus drags around his security blanket.
This big scarf was special. It was beautiful, soft and extravagantly pretty. I’d hesitated while buying it because I suspected from the start that it was too nice for me — and I was buying on consignment. It wasn’t the price but the fineness of the item that intimidated me.
I’m not being coy or falsely modest when I say that I consider myself unworthy of the delicate, the fragile or the perishable. I didn’t grow up around fancy stuff, so I don’t tend to treat things tenderly.
My family members smashed dishes for punctuation, so let’s just say the china was not Limoges. The glassware was from Esso and had tigers on it. We used paper napkins, one napkin per person, per day.
I didn’t worry about wrecking anything, which made life easier because I am, at heart, a wrecker.
I lack grace, poise and balance. I careen from place to place. When senses of decorum were being handed out, I was in another room — probably knocking something over. As soon as I got a toy, I lost some part of it. I never in my life owned a Barbie for whom I could provide two shoes that matched. I was accused of having lost the Oriental Avenue card from our family’s Monopoly set, causing us to substitute an entirely inappropriate index card.
I don’t remember losing Oriental Avenue, but that’s the point about losing stuff. Intention has nothing to do with it. When it’s gone, it’s gone; disappeared, vamoosed, escaped. It might have been destroyed, or it might have been rescued.
Perhaps the most frustrating question asked of people who are chronic losers (and I use the term with full understanding of its implications) is “Where did you have it last?”
If you’re calm — and on the right medications — you can understand the logic behind such a line of inquiry.
If, however, you are frenzied and searching for something beloved or essential or consequential — pet or offspring, cell phone or bail money, piece of paper with the fail-safe code preventing viruses from infecting computers worldwide, or an elegant shawl — you don’t want to be asked where you last saw it. You want to be told where it is.
You’re on a quest. Your earliest childhood vulnerabilities return with a vengeance. You return to a state of innocence, the kind of naiveté you had in that darkened movie theater when you turned to a trusted adult and asked “What happened to Bambi’s mother?” You didn’t understand that random acts of chaos just happened. That’s why, as a kid, you had hope.
Hope is why I called half the residents of Florida to ask whether they’d seen my scarf.
Nobody had. The scarf went rogue. It became a stray. Unneutered, it might well be capable of spawning hundreds of other scarves and starting a colony. We should only be so lucky.
I’m paying a price for not paying attention. Had I been cold enough, in need of the shawl on a practical basis, I would’ve wrapped it around me and known where it was.
What I need to do is let go of what’s already gone. What an easy phrase to write; what a difficult task to accomplish.
What I am left with is a different kind of hope: that whoever found it will believe themselves lucky and believe themselves worthy. Maybe it was meant for them all along. Things have a way of showing up.
Gina Barreca is a board of trustees distinguished professor of English literature at the University of Connecticut and the author of 10 books. She can be reached at www.ginabarreca.com.