the ocean

There's a special kind of madness that comes with moving, in that there will inevitably be one or two items that you know you moved but cannot find. You check the same god-forsaken spots in your new place over and over again -- the file cabinet, the drawer in the front credenza, the closet in the office -- and still come up empty handed. You brainstorm other unlikely spots where you might have put them (could you maybe have tucked them into the toaster for safekeeping?) to no avail. And you question the basic reality of concepts like "things" and "existing," for surely there is a larger metaphysical solution; it could not simply be that you are becoming absent minded as you age. 

I mention this because there have been several such incidents in connection with our recent move, if you can imagine such a thing. For the most part, they only dealt with items that we could easily do without or replace, such as photo reprints or the little plastic things that people sometimes use to hold corn. And so they remained unsolved mysteries, at least until I randomly stumble upon some duplicate hot shots of our trip to Park City stuck behind the storage shelving as I'm hauling out the Casio keyboard for light entertainment at my retirement party. But this week I could not find some work papers that I actually needed, and so a frenzied two-day search commenced. The good news, I guess, is that I did eventually find them in a file folder I'd somehow mislabeled (what could "Fergie Bat Mitzvah" even be referring to?). The bad news is that, once located, they were of course no where near as helpful as I'd imagined them to be. This is the secret to brilliance, I think: lose everything you write and allow it to exist only in your memory.