The Mysteries of Life: Things That Have Gone Missing

You know that parlor game where you name the person, living or dead, whom you would most like to have dinner with? Well, this is not about that.

This is about another fantasy. My fantasy is that some day I will learn the answers to all my questions about the mysteries of life. The great unsolved conundrums. All I have to do is ask. No, not who built the statues on Easter Island. Not the crop circles. Not even the Loch Ness monster or the communication of humbpack whales in their songs.

I want to know what happened to the missing piece from the unicorn puzzle. Also the ibuprofen pill I dropped in the downstairs bathroom last August. Missing socks are of course a major life mystery.

I don’t have to know about that brown glove that slipped out of my pocket in Alexandria, or my cell phone that got left in the movie theater on 72nd Street in New York City. Those are things that I lost. I’m talking about things that just disappear.

In my fantasy, the Lord of Things That Have Gone Missing will answer all my questions. What happened to my teddy bear that was on my cot in our tent at Camp Anna Behrens? And that roll of film from the 1983 vacation in Port Huron, after I mailed it in to the processing place? Where are Tom’s two favorite mugs that vanished into thin air last year?

Lost mail is a whole subcategory for the interrogation. The 6” x 8” envelope I sent to Rachel on December 12 is tucked behind some postal machine this very moment, or in the kitchen of one of her neighbors where it was delivered by mistake. Or maybe it’s in a landfill, crushed against a weekly circular from Shoprite because someone doesn’t recycle. I want to know.

These were real things in the real world, and they are some place on this earth. (Or, in the case of teddy, they were some place on this earth.) The Lord of TTHGM knows. Where were they all the time I was looking? Where are they now?

Until then, I’m doing my part (faith without works is dead, James 2:20). I keep the solo socks in a special little corner of the sock drawer. I never stop searching for the mugs. I go to the post office and grill them about the mail.

But I dream of that great day of reckoning, when all will be revealed.