ITS BEEN LOST TO TIME HOW TO
Nor did my sister have any good advice on how to find missing objects-although, in fairness, such advice is itself difficult to find. “Call me,” she said, “when they know your name at the D.M.V.” My sister was gratifyingly astonished that I’d never lost my wallet before, but, as someone who typically has to reconstruct the entire contents of her own several times a year, she was not exactly sympathetic. Once I recovered my phone and reached her, however, both hopes vanished as completely as the bike lock. For another, I thought she might help given her extensive experience with losing things, I figured she must have developed a compensatory capacity for finding them. For one thing, I thought she might commiserate. That’s why I called her when I started uncharacteristically misplacing stuff myself. Back outside on the streets of Portland, I spun around as uselessly as a dowsing rod. Channelling the kind of advice one is often given as a child, I returned to the bookstore, calmed myself down with a cup of tea, collected my thoughts amid the latest literary débuts, and then, to the best of my ability, retraced the entire course of my evening, in the hope that doing so would knock loose some memory of how I got there. Must be your lucky day!” Officer, you have no idea. “No, Ma’am,” he veritably sang into the phone, “no pickup trucks from downtown this evening.
The man who answered was wonderfully affable. Feeling like the world’s biggest idiot, and wondering how much it was going to cost to extricate a truck the size of Nevada from a tow lot, I called the Portland Police Department. For the next forty-five minutes, as a cool blue night gradually lowered itself over downtown, I walked around looking for the truck, first on the street where I was sure I’d parked, then on the nearest cross streets, and then in a grid whose scale grew ever larger and more ludicrous.įinally, I returned to the street where I’d started and noticed a small sign: “ No Parking Anytime.” Oh, shit. Yet I’d somehow managed to misplace it in downtown Portland-a city, incidentally, that I know as well as any other on the planet. It had tires that came up to my midriff, an extended cab, and a bed big enough to haul cetaceans.
ITS BEEN LOST TO TIME DRIVER
The friend to whom it belonged once worked as an ambulance driver oversized vehicles do not faze her.
This was a serious feat, a real bar-raising of thing-losing, not only because in general it is difficult to lose a truck but also because the truck in question was enormous. I parked, went to the event, hung around talking for a while afterward, browsed the bookshelves, walked outside into a lovely summer evening, and could not find the truck anywhere. Eventually, having spent an absurd amount of time looking for the lock and failing to find it, I gave up and drove the truck downtown instead. This was annoying, because I was planning to bike downtown that evening, to attend an event at Powell’s, Portland’s famous bookstore. I’d just arrived home and removed it from its packaging when my phone rang I stepped away to take the call, and when I returned, some time later, the lock had vanished. I got the wallet back, but the next day I lost the bike lock. Yet later that afternoon I stopped by a sporting-goods store to buy a lock for my new bike and left my wallet sitting next to the cash register. Prior to that summer, I should note, I had lost a wallet exactly once in my adult life: at gunpoint. When I returned to claim it, I discovered that I’d left my wallet behind as well.
A few days after that, warming up in the midday sun at an outdoor café, I took off the long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing, only to leave it hanging over the back of the chair when I headed home. The next day, I left the keys to the house in the front door. My first day in town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a coffee shop. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.Īnd then, mystifyingly, everything fell out of place. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things.
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