Published: October 08, 2009 06:30 am      

Better to have lost ...

I thought texting was my major weakness. Turns out there’s a list.

It’s looking more and more like organization should be the focus of education for me. You’d think I’d have it mastered, having been a teacher and stuff.

I was that oddball (shocker) that had the seek and find desk. I knew where everything was, just not necessarily which level of the pile. I tried the little labeled trays, but coordination is pretty high on the aforementioned list, so after they got knocked off so many times, leaving mix-n-match paper trails, I gave up and returned to the pile method. Those papers were just safer right in the middle of the desk.

As you can imagine, the house is no different. As a professional piler, I’m raising the next generation of pilers. Their dad is a slinger, so we’re making slinger-pilers. If you recall the snake column, there was an issue finding an appropriate snake-slaying tool. That was a direct result of slinging.

I have a theory.

When you’re short on tools anyway, and then on top of that, you don’t put them away after you use them, you have to spend a rather frustrating amount of time looking for them. This, as a rule, occurs when you have the least amount of time to spend on a scavenger hunt.

Naturally, if you’ve already exhausted your patience searching for a tool you may not actually even own, by the time you find something you think might work in its place, the automatic reaction when it doesn’t is to sling it across the yard.

I don’t yet have a theory for socks stuffed into the recliner, or T-shirts lying in the hallway or towels in the bathroom floor, but I know why we can never find clean any of those.

As the junk accumulates and new piles appear at random intervals, I find I’m not as good at remembering which stack I saw this or that in, or which corner of the yard Mike slung something into.

I really thought my time had come when I went to the standard spot where I usually find that wrench thing he uses to change the oil in his truck -- and it wasn’t there. What? It’s always there, right between the front wheels. He changes the oil where he parks, and he always leaves the oil pan and that thing right beside it. It stays there rain or shine when he leaves to go to work, and it’s always sitting right there when he parks in the evening. I started using the oil pan as a daytime rain gauge.

He never remembers that, so while he’s muttering under his breath because he can’t find it, I just go crawl under his truck and get it. I get a sort of twisted satisfaction out of elaborately dusting the grass off my knees and then quietly handing it to him.

But this time, it wasn’t there. I was really upset. It had become the one thing I could count on, and IT WASN’T THERE. Turns out the dog is a piler, too, and she’s started collecting all the things we leave in the yard that she can carry. I never asked Zeke where he found that hoe we smashed the snake with, but I’ll lay odds it was in the flower bed where the dog sleeps. Why not? There aren’t any flowers in there.

I actually used to work pretty hard at putting things back where they belonged and trying to keep things picked up, so I was the resident expert on where everything was. Every conversation seemed to start with “Have you seen ...” or “Do you know where ...” fill in the blank. The speaker varied, but the response was the same. Sigh. Most of the time I could come up with whatever was lost.

Zeke, bless his heart, rarely makes me look for anything. He piles and slings in his own room — we don’t go in there — but I’d like to have the hours back I’ve spent looking for Mike’s flash drive, or Zoey’s other shoe. And batteries. And matches.

I decided it wasn’t a fun game, however, so I took my toys and went home, so to speak ... now I can’t find them.

The other morning I was late to work, like that’s a bulletin, when I realized I had the interviews for four different stories in the one notebook I could not find. I flew through the house in hysteria, instantly transforming into a slinger. Nothing. I ran to the truck and slung some more. Still nothing. Finally, I knew I had no choice.

I ran into the bedroom, where Mike was peacefully sleeping through two storms, mine and the weather.

I pounced.

“Have you seen that black notebook I had yesterday? It has my life in it and I CAN’T FIND IT.”

He wasn’t awake enough to realize he shouldn’t ask me if I’d looked everywhere. I think I might have yelled a little.

It really is always in the last place you look. Guess where it was. At the barn. I don’t know why, but that’s where it was. Kind of like finding your car keys in the refrigerator, don’t you think?

Once he was awake enough to remember my early morning attack, he called me to let me know he was mad, but he had to try twice.

I have two phones now. One is my personal cell, the one whose space bar doesn’t work, and the other is my work cell. It’s good I have them. I use the one I can find to call and find the one I’ve lost. Lucky they’re always lost somewhere in the house. Yesterday, that didn’t work out, though.

I lost them both and had to borrow Mike’s phone. Fortunately, he wasn’t mad anymore.

Contact Mandy Carter at mcarter@mcalesternews.com.