Kids & Parenting

On Things That Just Get Lost

by Hannah Violette
03/24/06
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I have a hate-hate relationship with my key ring. Some people have love-hate relationships; they love pasta but hate what it does to their thighs, they love their job but hate the people they deal with (I never quite understood that one, myself), they love their family but hate taking them into public venues for fear of embarrassment (I have no problem with that one). My relationship with my keys, however, is definitely hate-hate; I hate having to pack them around, and I hate it even more when I can't find them to pack around.

Just the other day, I frantically dissembled the dining room, throwing purse contents far and wide as family members and pets ducked for cover, all to no avail. Those keys had just disappeared, into that nebulous dimension known for being a haven to sock singles from the dryer. (We still wonder where the keys from our last home disappeared to, the day before we moved.) After my fruitless search, my husband begrudgingly and with no conscious hope of ever seeing them again, loaned me his set so I could at least drive myself to work.

Upon meeting him later, he extended to me my key ring, complete with purple-squerchy-guy (the stress-relieving-squeezy-toy I keep on it for daily comfort in a trying world). It was on his desk. How it got there I'll never know; I don't even remember going to his office. Needless to say, he immediately relieved me of his own keys. My mother frequently threatens to have them surgically attached.

The modern-day mystery of disappearing keys is not alone. How about the technological wonder called the cellular phone? Oh, the joy of being tethered to everyone who wants you at any time, day or night! Not even the bathroom stall in the mall food court is sacred! Frankly, I don't understand why we have enslaved ourselves to this mighty wonder that allows us no privacy or days off. I lost mine the other day. I dialed its number (amazing that I even knew it - who dials their own number?) and was greeted at the voice mailbox: "Sorry, you've missed me again. Please leave your name and number, and I'll get back to you as soon as I find my stupid phone!!"

Where cell phones go, I'll never know. All I know is that the next morning, there it was, plugged into the charger. I swear it wasn't there the day before, as I again unleashed all the fury of a woman scorned by the unexplainable absence of her digital security blanket. Comforted by its restored presence, I proceeded to call everyone in my phone book, just for the sake of knowing I could, once again, be connected to the world around me.

Connection. The cell phone is a symbol of our secure connection to those we love, those we hate, those we feel nothing at all for but are significant fixtures in our daily existence. We're connected to friends, family, law enforcement, employment, entertainment. Connection is indeed a point of security for us. As we grow and age, our connections change and evolve parallel to our lives. The loss of that connection leaves us disoriented, scared, and confused.

Security. Keys unlock the sealed, and protect the valuable. They protect our connections. With my keys I control, to some extent, where I am, who I'm with, and what I'm doing. With that key I get in the car with my family and drive to our home, a place locked up and safe from those nasty meanies outside that might come in and wreak havoc and despair on us. With that key, I unlock the door to my classroom, and engage in my chosen vocation, a sense of security and identity, teaching runny-nosed kindergartners how to say "p-p-p-a-a-a-n-n-n, pan!" With that key, I unlock treasure troves of stickers and gummy bears and other incentives for active listening and finishing a learning center. I unlock my desk drawer, where I keep teacher-parent communiques, agonizing over those students who lack parents concerned enough to ensure their child's academic success.

Security and connection are vital to our existence as being in community. The cell phone and the jangly ring of keys are tangible "touchpoints" for those intangibles. Losing the tangible is frustrating; the disappearance of the intangible, maddening.

A lifetime ago, I traipsed through nettle-laced forests with Denice, my best friend. We grew up together, we roomed together as co-eds, we wrote and called and passed boyfriends under each other's scrutinizing gazes. Where is Denice now? I think I might have her e-mail.

As a young career woman, I power-walked the track, every day without fail, with Vickie and Christy, sharing life, love, God, and the deepest, darkest, most recessed rooms in my soul. A Christmas card a few years ago was the last contact I had with them.

A few months ago, I saw my sister for the first time since her wedding four years ago. It was like meeting a stranger.

Relationships. Where do they go? Those people in our lives that are so vital and important one moment vanish in a fleeting instant. Is it merely a case of evolving connections, or is it a case of being too busy, too preoccupied, too possessed by the urgent to maintain stewardship of the beauty entrusted to us? Somehow, I think that maybe my connections with the tangible crowd out those intangible, priceless connections. I'm sorry, Denice, Christy, and Vickie. Maintaining my Franklin Mint Curio Cat Collection was more important to me than keeping our connections with each other secure.

Time. Yesterday, my seventeen-year-old son remarked that weekends were going by just too quickly. His father and I looked at each other and laughed. When weekends become decades, then you know you're old.

But time does disappear. At the dawn of history, mankind lived not by an atomic clock in Colorado, a wind-up watch or even a sundial, but by the rising and setting of the sun, by the ocean tides, by the endless procession of seasonal cycles. Did they have a different perspective of time? Did they worry over packing as much into a life span as was humanly possible? Did they worry about a life span at all? Or did they focus on the well-being of the tribe, the clan, the family unit, doing what was necessary for the survival of the whole and enjoying each others' presence and place in the community?

Now, in the 21st-century A.D., we worry about such things as time management, how many earning years we have left, and preserving and extending our youth that we may enjoy quality golden years with our grandchildren's children. "As the sand in the hourglass falls, so too are the Days of our Lives" says one popular soap opera. "Time keeps on slipping...into the future" chants Steve Miller and his band. With every year, I am haunted by the fact that the small window of time God has granted me to touch, to move, to impact the people within my sphere of influence is growing ever smaller. Time is running out. Will I ever accomplish my dreams? When I am gone, what part of me will remain with my children, my grandchildren, my community? Do I have enough time to get it all done? I'm sorry, Baker City, that I was too busy with myself and my own concerns to invest myself more into your well-being. Perhaps you could indeed have been my dream home had I done so.

Last year, my family moved. Our new home is in a diametrically opposite climate from our previous home, and I've spent the last year fighting one cold, flu bug or infection after another. Even five years ago, I never caught more than one cold a year, come rain or shine, no matter where I was on the planet. As the weather changes, my knees and knuckles ache. I can't do yoga like I used to, and my efforts with the weight set are quite amusing. I rely more and more on young men like my son to open pickle jars and lift heavy boxes, delighted in the fact that age brings the opportunity to enlist slave labor. My dog gets more exercise out of our jog than I do, and she definitely enjoys it more. Staying up late means staying awake through Voyager, and sleeping in is rising at seven o'clock instead of six-thirty.

Health and physical vitality just disappear. As mine start to bow further offstage, I increase my daily dosage of Theragran-M, enroll in Weight Watchers and invest in some product with glucosamine and chondroitin to woo them back into the limelight. Rather than my body caring for me, I must now care for it, more meticulously than I ever considered. But I can't ignore the diminishing quality my body continues to display.

A common journey for me is the one between the living room and my bedroom. I take this journey four or five times a week, all at once. This journey entails going to the bedroom with a clear focus and purpose in mind, only to arrive there not knowing why. Back to the living room, only to remember what I wanted from the bedroom, going back to the bedroom, with nary a clue as to why I'm there. And so on and so forth until I finally remember what I wanted was really in the kitchen.

A cute(?) little sign on our favorite diner's wall says, "Of all the things I've ever lost, I miss my mind the most." The disappearance of time and health seem to bring with it the disappearance of memory and mental agility. Physiologically speaking, our brains become less able to absorb new patterns, new routines, new knowledge. They start to use accumulated knowledge to make up for the growing difficulty in learning. Psychologists call this crystallized learning versus fluid learning. (Not so fluid anymore, are we?) Taking a college course, even in my thirties, is far more of a major mental undertaking than it was as a fresh-faced, 18-year-old freshman.

My mother, a minister, visits an Alzheimer's ward twice a month. The mentally ravaged that used to be vital, productive members of society break her heart as they cuddle rag dolls and rock themselves to the music, hearing something in the privacy of their own mind. But more heartbreaking to her is her own mother. Once a strong, proud, willful woman, my grandmother is now tired, frail, and more and more forgetful, even to the point of not remembering conversation from five minutes previous.

Mental soundness often just disappears. That is, perhaps, the most unnerving disappearance to consider. I myself continue to learn and push myself mentally, in hopes of never losing my own clarity. There are no guarantees. I'm sorry, Grandma, that I never took the time to know you when I had it to take. I think I was busy icing my knee.

All these things - relationships, time, physical health, mental strength - are symbols of security and connection. As with keys and cell phones, they all have a tendency to disappear if not tended to adequately.

Ultimately, things that just disappear from our own lack of responsibility, laziness, and apathy can and often do reappear. Keys can be re-cut, cell phones replaced. Relationships can be rekindled and time can be managed and in some cases, redeemed; what the locust devours can be restored. We can guard our health, and perhaps mental decline can be seen as a welcome state of final peace. Those things that are lost can be found again: the wallet, the single sock that hid under the bed, your sister-in-law's phone number.

Our greatest challenge, however, is to guard those things that cannot be replaced once they are gone. A stack of mail on my dining room table boasts the weekly pile of local business advertisements: $2.00 off any large pizza, Grand Opening! for a new martinizing service, 3 rooms of carpet cleaned for the price of two, have you seen these children? Have you seen those children? You know, the ones who just disappeared. They were here one day, the next they were gone. As far as Mom and Dad know, they were playing up the block with Suzie and Johnny, but Suzie and Johnny don't know anything. Mom and Dad are so broken up.

It's amazing that all of a sudden they seem to miss them, for they certainly didn't care that they weren't reading on grade level, that they came to school every day unbathed and hungry, that they spent upwards of seven hours a day in front of the television, unsupervised at home while they were out doing whatever it was that kept them away.

Sometimes the children who disappear, reappear. Not always well, not even always alive, but they reappear. The wound is sealed, the questions put to an uneasy rest.

Sometimes they never reappear. Forever lost, to our sight, to our hope, and eventually to time's memory. Those wounds gape until the bearers, too, disappear from us.

More tragically, consider the children that just disappear - right before our very eyes. We feed them, we clothe them, we might even make sure their homework is done on time and tuck them in at night. But inside, they are lost. Sitting so quietly at school, never being obtrusive, never seeming out-of-the-ordinary, they just disappear. They disappear into the deceptive routine of normalcy, going to school, going to church, saying the right things, never understanding why no one sees their hurt.

Columbine High School was painfully shocked into seeing that hurt when two lost children decided to reappear. Only for a moment did they surface, then they disappeared permanently, taking others with them. I'm sorry, God, that my own need for security and connection have eclipsed that same need in others around me. Forgive my selfishness; replace it with selflessness.

Why do they disappear? Because they have no security, no connection. While we are so busy maintaining our own security and connection, are we helping these fragile souls establish their own? Are we grounding them into safe relationships with God, with parents, with teachers and mentors, with each other? With themselves? Are we securing their vital place in our society?

The gravity of our responsibility is staggering.

That responsibility will never disappear.

Cherish it.