Lost & Never Found Again: Gyroscope

When I was very young, maybe three or four years old, my Grandmother worked at a grocery store, Best Way, in the small Louisiana town where we lived; she was the butcher, actually, but that’s another story.

The Best Way always had an impressive selection of comic books, Cracked, and Mad magazines that I’d read in the break room while visiting my Mam at work, and a pretty decent selection of cheesy toys: cap guns, puffy Batman stickers, jacks, and paddleballs and whatnot, but occasionally, they’d have something special.
(more…)

Lost & Never Found Again: Elmo The Comb

It is 1978. I am nine years old, a lonely, rootless kid riding in the back of a dilapidated Trailways bus rumbling across dusty Wyoming, and the whole of my life is a magical-realist, country-and-western version of David Copperfield. I’m talking about Dickens, though in retrospect I did seem pretty good at making people disappear.

Everything is television. It’s the only reliable thing. We go from town to town. I know nobody, and my inherent weirdness goes a long way towards keeping it that way. But when I turn on that TV, I know everybody, everything is funny or interesting or comforting. It doesn’t matter what town I’m in, or who I’m with: there is always Fred G. Sanford. As long as his heart can take it.
(more…)

Lost & Never Found Again: Badges And Plastic Babies

I had a pair of Sparks badges, Kimono My House-era, that I bought on Ebay when I first got into Sparks. (Yes, I was a latecomer). I loved them dearly and wore them on my green winter jacket. A few winters ago, I went on a trip to Amsterdam with my friend Zoe. When we got off the train from Schilpol to Amsterdam Centraal, there was naturally a huge group of people, and even as we were on the platform, I realized that I had lost my Ron badge, but it was too late. There was not going to be any searching around on the ground with such a massive hubbub. I like to think a Dutch Sparks fan found it and they lived happily ever after.
(more…)

Lost & Never Found Again: LOVE Night Light

When I was a child, in the six-to-eight-year-old zone, I was intensely into a myriad of unexplainables: particularly, UFO’s, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, Frankenstein, etc. My fascination with these things, augmented by lots of reading, was offset by routine nightmares. Blood-curdling screams would jar my parents awake; they would come running to my bedside thinking that I was being killed by an intruder.
(more…)

Lost & Never Found Again: My Gameboy Advance

Man, it really shows the passage of time when you look up a product’s release date and it just seems like yesterday when you got your hands on it. I got my Gameboy Advance in 2001 as part of a “group gift” with my sister; she got a pink one, I got one of the translucent purple models. With it, I had received Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which at the time entertained me to no end; I mean, I got to play as Spider-Man—as a comics nerd, I was in nirvana.

So it was during one of many summer trips that I learned a rule I still keep to this day: don’t lend anything out that you’re not prepared to lose. My brother, who had started enjoying video games himself, had pulled the ol’ “Share with me” argument with my mom, which kept him quietly kick-flipping all the way home.
(more…)

Lost & Never Found Again: 1982 Rolling Stones Concert T-Shirt

When I turned 21, my friends threw me a big party. It was a slightly muggy Memorial Day weekend, but we all had a blast and a half spending the evening on the decorated carport. Lots of music, snacks, and of course, booze-to-the-max! My mom had dropped by earlier in the day to drop off lots of delicious snacks that she had made for the party. She also brought a special gift for me from my stepdad Garry.

It was a Rolling Stones T-shirt from 1982. Garry was a paramedic and often took jobs at arena concerts. One of the ongoing perks was a concert tee made just for the paramedics. He had kept them all. I’d had my eye on the Rolling Stones shirt ever since my mom had shown it to me years before. It was yellow, had the Rolling Stones tongue logo on the front, and the word MEDICAL in black across the shoulders on the back. I was so excited that he had given it to me and it was instantly my favorite shirt.
(more…)

Lost And Never Found Again: My Myrtle Beach Pavilion Season Pass

Photo © 2006
Erechtheus

Myrtle Beach provided me with a rather idyllic childhood: a laid-back, relatively safe beach town with just enough activities and picturesque landscape to keep me engaged. To top it all off, we had the Myrtle Beach Pavilion. With a little over 40 rides packed into an 11-acre parcel just off the ocean, the Pavilion was the best place to spend a day.
(more…)

Lost And Never Found Again: My Class Ring

My high school has a very unique-looking ring design: a green jewel in the middle with the school logo, surrounded by gold (regular or white—your choice). I cherished my high school ring when I got it, but nonetheless I lost it in 1998 during rehearsals of a community theater production of Narnia.
(more…)

Lost & Never Found Again: Mixtapes

I made a mix tape in 1990 that I loved and lost. I loved it because it was filled with odd songs and crazy stuff that I collected from different sources. All I can remember now is that it had Kid Frost’s “La Raza” on it, and that it had a heart painted on the case with nail polish.
(more…)

Lost & Never Found Again: An Introduction

That’s one “O”. . .

For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be running daily Blog posts about things lost and never found again. These won’t be things of the philosophical persuasion (youth, innocence, etc.) but items from the material realm. We would like to address, albeit in a small way, how the concept of losing a tangible object can be so frustrating, especially when that feeling, unlike the object itself, never vanishes completely.
Less Lee Moore, Managing Editor
(more…)