I never used to remember my dreams and now that I do, I wish I didn’t. They all seem to be about losing things: luggage in an airport, my wallet, the gate.
“It’s probably nothing,” I told myself. Until I started reading those online dream analyses, and learned that this was probably because I had too much going on.
“You have too many pots on the stove,” said one. “Something’s going to happen if you don’t get it together.”
The prediction was so dire that I immediately went into high gear trying to discredit it.
Who, after all, can believe a dream analysis that appears on the same page as the cartoon picture of a swollen foot and the red-letter warning “Signs your liver is dying”?
Also – ahem – I can think of only two solid things I have permanently lost, with no clue of their whereabouts. Well, approximately two.
One occurred just this month. Returning from a vacation, I discovered I had somehow lost the lower half of a zip-off pantleg. How could that have happened?
I gently accused my daughter, who’d been visiting, of somehow grabbing it during a when our laundry was commingled on the basement ping pong table.
“Nope,” she said. “I looked.”
I toyed with the idea of writing the owner of a bed and breakfast where I’d stayed to see if it had fallen out of my laundry bag. But I didn’t.
“Impossible,” I said. The top of the plastic garbage bag was pulled shut.
Come to think of it, I was only using the garbage bag because my pride of travel purchases – a cloth drawstring collapsible bag – had disappeared. But that doesn’t count since it later reappeared – in my suitcase, of all places.
The other permanently lost item – a gold pin in the shape of a goldfish – disappeared about 50 years ago. I am so sure it fell off my blouse digging in the yard that I’ve fantasized about going back to the long-sold house to see if an excavation might turn it up. (Sentimental value here. His name was “Swish.”)
This doesn’t count the temporarily lost things that are easily explainable. The recent ones I blame on downsizing. Who, after all, can remember, after eliminating truckloads of “stuff,” whether a particular soup ladle made it into the “keep” pile? I can remember the debate, just not the resolution. And if I kept it, who could possible remember where? It used to be two drawers over from the stove, in a cabinet I no longer have.
Same with the plastic corn holders used in August and September to keep the butter from running all over the dinner plate. I can still picture them – cheap plastic and pink – but they no longer seem to live by the paper plates. Still, their loss is not as worrisome as my five year old’s question many years ago, “Have you seen my grape Popsicle?”
On Memorial Day, I scrambled to find my beloved full-size American flag designed from pictures of red, white and blue hydrangeas, only to remember I no longer had a flag holder and pole, and rushed out instead to purchase small garden flags. I could have sworn I had some, but alas.
With all this, I am reassuring myself with triumphs in the lost and found department. When friends needed a couple decks of cards for our vacation outing, I was able to handily produce two I didn’t even remember I had. Same with an extra bathmat I remarkably remembered I’d saved in the move “just in case.”
Dreams as troubling as they may be, I have rarely resorted to the tactic recommended by a one-time boss of mine: placing scissors on the stove until the location of the lost item came to her. It seemed to work, and we spent lively lunch hours contemplating why. Maybe not obsessing on the answer led her to it?
A whirling dervish of a woman, she placing scissors on the stove quite a lot and reporting the next morning that she had reclaimed everything from lost reports to diamond bracelets. I have no idea how she managed it. My stove has way too many pots.
Copyright 2021 Pat Snyder
