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

For many years, I had a knack for losing jewelry. Not valuable gold, gemstones, or heirlooms, but things that were singularly irreplaceable and/or exceedingly sentimental.

The cloisonné Crow T. Robot pin that was on my motorcycle jacket until it fell off at a House Of Blues show (I’d only had it about six months). The green agate that fell out of the vintage ring in a parking lot, never to be seen again. There are likely too many of these to remember them all, but here are a few.

There was the silver toggle choker with a dangling heart charm I bought at Macy’s for less than $20. I loved this necklace and wore it almost every day. Then it disappeared mysteriously after about a year. I looked in various stores, open markets, and Ebay for a similar necklace and never found one. It wasn’t that the necklace was valuable (it wasn’t), it was that I liked the design so much. It seemed ridiculous that I couldn’t find one like it!

There was also the pair of ceramic, hand-painted earrings shaped like wooden shoes that had belonged to my mom, a gift from someone’s trip to Holland. Naturally, I only lost one and the remaining earring was just an irritating reminder of my irresponsibility. It wasn’t even my earring, so I felt even worse about losing it.

Another borrowed item that I lost, ironically by lending it to someone else, was the brushed gold ankh ring that had been my mother’s in the ’60s. A girl in my high school liked it and wanted to wear it “just for that day.” I didn’t know her well, and she certainly wasn’t my friend, but I was 15 and didn’t want to look uncool, so I let her wear it.

The next day she claimed that she lost it. And repeated this story every day until she started to get annoyed with me for bugging her about it, you know, annoyed in that way that makes you think you might get your ass beat in the parking lot after school (which was semi-constant threat in those days). So I eventually stopped asking. It took me years to realize that she was just lying and that she’d probably planned to steal the ring from me the minute she saw it.

The most vexing of all the lost items of jewelry was a tiny, oval shaped, metal and red painted wood harmonica charm I’d inherited from my stepmother when I was very young. It was German in origin, with tiny inscriptions in that language, and an etched image of a violin on one side. Although it was about an inch and a half long, it was actually functional. I had it for over a decade until I started wearing it on a necklace in college (this was during the early ’90s when chokers were “in”). It was a tremendous conversation piece, too.

One night, I went out with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while to this bar that I had never been to before. It was a rather uncomfortable night: we went to a cheesy frat bar and it was so loud inside I could barely hear her. I remember being sad that she seemed to be trying way too hard to be popular and I felt we were losing touch.

When I got home, I realized the charm was gone. It wasn’t in my friend’s car and she couldn’t remember seeing it. I was upset, not just because I had lost this item I’d had since childhood, something that my stepmom had given me, but because it was so unique and irreplaceable AND because I had lost it on an outing that symbolized something else “lost,” in this case, my friendship with this girl.

Eventually, our friendship really did dissipate, not because she tried too hard to be popular, but because she went down a completely different path, one on which I just could not follow her.

None of these items had monetary value. I wasn’t attached to them because they represented status, but because they seemed so different, and thus, more special. In some strange way, though, I felt like they represented a small part of me.