Published May 20, 2007 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune

Lost and Found

By Aaron J. Brown

This week I lost a whole box of geraniums off the roof of my car when I forgot to load them after buckling Henry into his car seat. I didn’t realize it until I was miles down the road. I could have gone back, but I knew those geraniums were gone for good. Life has taught me that every loss brings a potential find. What you find isn’t always what you lost, but it’s usually of equal or greater value.

When I was a kid, grandpa pinned a silver sheriff’s badge to my shirt the moment I arrived for a visit. It was one of those great kid moments. At the end of a long autumn day of playing in the leaves it was time to go home, but the sheriff’s badge was nowhere to be found. I never did find the badge, but I still remember how meticulously my whole family combed the leaf-filled yard looking for it. Though I didn’t realize it then, that memory was worth more than the badge.

When we lose things, it’s not the absent things that upset us; it’s what the things mean. For a 24 hour period after our son was born, I lost the memory card with all the digital pictures. I had backed them up on our computer, but there’s something about losing the original record of your first son’s birth that makes people treat you a little bit more like Hitler than they otherwise would. I found the card under our computer desk, but the scare was real.

My wife Christina told me about an essay she wrote for school when she was 12 entitled “The Island of Lost Things.” Gnomes would take your things to this island and try to use them. If the item had no use they would toss it back to the regular world where you might find them later, thus explaining why you sometimes found lost items but not always. That makes as much sense as any other theory.

Perhaps, as some couples find with brief separations, it can be good to spend some time apart from your lost things. Our son Henry experiences this all the time. He’ll play with his favorite toy for days before eventually hiding it somewhere for safe keeping and forgetting it. Then, as with his toy road grater this morning, he finds it later and acts like he’s received a brand new toy. “I can’t believe it,” I imagine his toddler mind saying. “I used to have one just like this.”

That’s the real reason professional movers can pack a house in less than a day when it takes the owners a week to do it themselves. As you empty drawers and move furniture, you find things that you thought to be lost and you have to take a moment to appreciate them. Hey, remember when these shirts were cool? Whoa, we still have the Atari. I wonder if it works. Oh wow, it does! And suddenly it is 1986 all over again, and Centipede is the best video game ever produced. And yes, these things are just things, but losing and finding them is still somehow more satisfying than the impossible task of keeping them at our side forever.

Lost and found is much more than things. You can lose hope and find it again. We thought our terrier Molly Dog was gone when she fled into the rural wilderness near our home, but we found her and realized how important she was to us, despite her barking and inappropriate grooming habits. We lose loved ones, but find memories and ways to move on. And every loss – each dog, flash drive, watch, relative, friend, lover and shoe – is necessary for us to find who we are. Losing is lousy, but finding is what it’s all about.

There will be more geraniums and I will take better care of them in the future.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

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