Lost and found

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.