Losing Small Objects

It’s said that you become, in old age, an exaggerated version of who you were when you were young. Quirks turn into eccentricities, and one’s most frequent humor hardens into a stubborn personality.

If this is so, then I had better work to undo one of my most annoying idiosyncracies: hiding things. It’s not something I do often, but it almost always ends up the same: me not being able to find whatever it was I hid.

Who am I hiding things from? I’d like to know this. It’s something I’ve done for years, even as a child. Maybe I was influenced by all of the Nancy Drew novels I read over and over again as a young girl. Or too many episodes of police procedurals and Perry Mason. Always, in those dramas, there was something hidden, and someone looking for it. I guess it could come from an upsetting childhood event I no longer remember. Or perhaps it’s a residual neurosis from a former life, the result of a tragic error that I must, in this life, make right.

Okay, well maybe that’s a bit much. At any rate, I am looking for a key to a chest that contains 20 years’ worth of journals, and I can’t find it because I hid it for ’safekeeping.’ In this case I’ve been foiled by an instance of triple-deception. It’s not in its normal spot, nor in its back-up spot. Which means I must have determined a third spot on the spur of the moment. Bad move. The same principle for creating usernames and passwords must be applied to hiding things: take time to deliberate on it, make it something logical to oneself, and re-use it at least twice before allowing long stretches of time to elapse.

Now I am in an unfortunate situation. And I don’t want to turn into an old lady who hides things from myself and then accuses my hapless nephews, hypothetical-future-children, and medical professionals of stealing them from me. “Youuu, youuu,” I will say, poking a craggy finger in their weary, bewildered faces. “I know it was youuu took my precious!”

Oh dear.