When Issues Go Lacking
Reflections on two seasons of loss.
By Kathryn Schulz
Over a lifetime, we’ll lose some 2 hundred thousand objects apiece, plus cash, relationships, elections, family members. Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli
A few years in the past, I spent the summer season in Portland, Oregon, dropping issues. I usually stay on the East Coast, however that yr, unable to face one other sweltering August, I made a decision to quickly decamp to the West. This turned out to be unusually straightforward. I’d lived in Portland for some time after faculty, and a few acquaintances there wanted a home sitter. One other good friend was away for the summer season and completely happy to mortgage me her pickup truck. Somebody on Craigslist offered me a motorbike for subsequent to nothing. In very brief order, and with little or no effort, the whole lot fell into place.
After which, mystifyingly, the whole lot fell misplaced. My first day on the town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a espresso store. The subsequent day, I left the keys to the home within the entrance door. A couple of days after that, warming up within the noon solar at an outside café, I took off the long-sleeved shirt I’d been carrying, solely to depart it hanging over the again of the chair once I headed residence.
Once I returned to say it, I found that I’d left my pockets behind as effectively. Previous to that summer season, I ought to be aware, I had misplaced a pockets precisely as soon as in my grownup life: at gunpoint. But later that afternoon I ended by a sporting-goods retailer to purchase a lock for my new bike and left my pockets sitting subsequent to the money register.
I bought the pockets again, however the subsequent day I misplaced the bike lock. I’d simply arrived residence and eliminated it from its packaging when my cellphone rang; I stepped away to take the decision, and once I returned, a while later, the lock had vanished. This was annoying, as a result of I used to be planning to bike downtown that night, to attend an occasion at Powell’s, Portland’s well-known bookstore.
Finally, having spent an absurd period of time in search of the lock and failing to search out it, I gave up and drove the truck downtown as a substitute. I parked, went to the occasion, hung round speaking for some time afterward, browsed the bookshelves, walked outdoors into a beautiful summer season night, and couldn’t discover the truck wherever.
This was a severe feat, an actual bar-raising of thing-losing, not solely as a result of typically it’s tough to lose a truck but additionally as a result of the truck in query was huge. The good friend to whom it belonged as soon as labored as an ambulance driver; outsized automobiles don’t faze her.
It had tires that got here as much as my midriff, an prolonged cab, and a mattress sufficiently big to haul cetaceans. But I’d by some means managed to misplace it in downtown Portland—a metropolis, by the way, that I do know in addition to some other on the planet.
For the following forty-five minutes, as a cool blue night time step by step lowered itself over downtown, I walked round in search of the truck, first on the road the place I used to be positive I’d parked, then on the closest cross streets, after which in a grid whose scale grew ever bigger and extra ludicrous.
Lastly, I returned to the road the place I’d began and seen a small signal: “no parking anytime.” Oh, sh–. Feeling just like the world’s greatest fool, and questioning how a lot it was going to value to extricate a truck the dimensions of Nevada from a tow lot, I known as the Portland Police Division. The person who answered was splendidly affable. “No, Ma’am,” he assuredly sang into the cellphone, “no pickup vehicles from downtown this night. Have to be your fortunate day!”
Officer, you haven’t any thought. Channelling the type of recommendation one is commonly given as a toddler, I returned to the bookstore, calmed myself down with a cup of tea, collected my ideas amid the newest literary débuts, after which, to the most effective of my skill, retraced the complete course of my night, within the hope that doing so would knock unfastened some reminiscence of how I bought there. It didn’t. Again outdoors on the streets of Portland, I spun round as uselessly as a dowsing rod.
Seventy-five minutes later, I discovered the truck, in a superbly authorized parking area, on a block so unrelated to any cheap route from my home to the bookstore that I severely puzzled if I’d pushed there in some type of fugue state. I climbed in, headed residence, and, for causes I’ll clarify in a second, determined that I wanted to name my sister as quickly as I walked within the door. However I didn’t. I couldn’t. My cellular phone was again at Powell’s, on a shelf with all the opposite New Arrivals.
My sister is a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., extra conversant than most individuals within the psychological processes concerned in monitoring and misplacing objects. That’s not, nonetheless, why I needed to speak to her about my newly acquired propensity for dropping issues. I needed to speak to her as a result of, true to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, she is probably the most scatterbrained individual I’ve ever met.
