Certainly I have lost loves, over the years. Don’t be sad, I also found a love I never expected who arrived unannounced at my door step. Lucky not to lose that one.
I’ve remembered that 1974, my rust-bucket-Plymouth was stolen just off the Cass Corridor in Detroit. The cops found it about 24 hours later out of gas in a field. They drove me over to pick it up, nothing wrong with it. Just the dirtiest interior on record, with only a hot wire to disconnect. A vacuum and a wash, and good as it ever was. So happy to have found.
Sure, losses are tough and sometimes total. Certainly some of them I don’t particularly want to remember. Some of them hurt so much, we block their memory. I loved that Burberry Trench Coat in the mid 80’s; even though I had only recently learned to covet it watching Dustin Hoffman in Kramer versus Kramer. Dusty and me and a style we envied. I found how expensive the coats were and somehow came up with the cash to buy one. I never found the coat when I went back to that Edison hotel closet where I had left it. I never could talk myself into buying another. Lost. When I came back from grabbing a quick snack and arrived at the dock where my boat was last seen to be floating, the line from the dock instead led straight down. It had sunk. So sunk isn’t the same as lost. I raised it from the sandy bottom, bailed it out and continued on my merry way on that long ago little lake. Come to think of it, I lost a high school class ring in that same lake that was later found by a resourceful scuba diver. I finally don’t know what became of my ring.
My point is that many losses are only temporary, misplaced, or resolved because found. We heal. We forget. We cure. Win or lose we fight to find things back. If we’ve any residual of optimism about us, we remember the great times we won. The important things. I had a paper-back copy of a Helen MacInnes novel I hadn’t looked at for around 20 years. Making room on a shelf, I picked it up thinking to donate it. Dropping out of it was a picture of my daughter standing tall on a little elevated and carpeted reading “deck” that we had built in her Montessori pre-school. Our adorable daughter is around 6 in this picture, and already had been addicted to reading. What a find remembering her Montessori school, her teacher Jan Kramer, and what reading has meant and continues to be in her life. What a find. Stuck as a bookmark. Our daughter, my picture of her, and so happy to have found it. Some finds are pure serendipity. Luckily to be never really lost.
Exercises without a Theme 