One of the straps on my backpack bag was
starting to disconnect, so I dropped it off at a repair place last Saturday.
Since I won’t get it back until this coming Saturday, I had to swap my stuff
into an alternative. I’ve had that bag in constant use for two-and-a-half
years, so having to carry around something different is a huge break in my
pattern.
Sunday morning, I popped out to Whole Foods to
pick up stuff for my workweek breakfasts and lunches. I didn’t want to haul my
substitute bag, which is a cavernous canvas jobber from J. Peterman that’s
mostly used for travelling (it will hold two cameras, a laptop, a folding umbrella and my journal
with way too much room to spare for more stuff), so I just took my wallet and a tote bag with
me. I paid for my groceries, popped my wallet in the bag and came home,
thinking to myself, “Self, remember to put the wallet back in your bag, because
you’re going out to lunch later.”
Well, I put away the groceries in the
refrigerator, made breakfast and did some work until it was time to meet my
friend for lunch. As I was about to walk out the door, I thought it might be
good to check that I had, in fact, put the wallet in the bag, and I discovered
that indeed I had not.
You ever had one of those searches where you
start out looking in logical and reasonable places, and then move on to
ridiculous and stupid places? Yeah, that was me. For 20 minutes, I looked in
the J. Peterman bag (which only had three things in it) repeatedly, checked the
pockets of my parka, ran upstairs, riffled through papers; bupkis. Also: I looked in the refrigerator, behind the container of cottage cheese I'd bought. Twice. Eventually I
grabbed a couple of twenties from my backup stash and went out to meet my
friend.
On the way over, I called Whole Foods (even
though I distinctly remembered dumping the wallet in my tote bag after I paid
for the groceries, but remember: once you start down Stupid Street, you find it’s
one-way, and you just have to keep on). Nope, no wallet.
I had a nice lunch and a major catch-up, which
is always nice, and then I came back for another round of searching. I recalled
one of my friends going through a similar exercise the week before—she was
trying to remember where she’d put her passport. Someone posted something like “Seven
Steps to Finding Everything You’ve Lost”: methodologies for trying to remember
where you left stuff. I didn’t read the link, because at the time Susan was
looking for her passport, I hadn’t lost anything. But just as I was considering
PMing her to ask for the link, I recalled how she eventually found the passport.
She associated it with the last time she’d used it (on an African trip), and
then fished out the envelope where she’d put all her leftover Rand. Hey,
presto!
So, I started associating what I do when I come
home with shopping; one of my constants is to put the receipt in a kitchen
drawer. I opened the receipt drawer, and Eureka!
Massive relief, because I almost never use
cash, and in addition to my driver’s license, two credit cards and ATM card, my
wallet holds all my supermarket and restaurant affinity cards, my Dolcezza frequent
drinker and District Taco frequent eater punch cards, library cards for four
local systems, and the paid receipt for my handbag repair. I would not fancy
having to replace that lot.
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