Lost Things

Unfortunately, my mom hasn't been able to locate any of the lost things I discuss in the following entry, so I guess they really are gone.

I try not to think about it too much.  And as a result it doesn't bother me as much as perhaps it would.

But I've lost a lot of things--things that can't be replaced.

There are things from my childhood.  When I was a kid, my brother and I started the Herculean task of illustrating the entire Bible in full-page, full-color format.  With the ambition that only childhood can afford, we decided to draw pictures of every story in the Bible.  In many cases it wasn't just one picture per story, but multiple pictures.  Noah's Ark for example included a series of marker-and-crayon illustrations of showing the gradual rising of the waters.  I got as far as the story of Hagar and Ishmael before the project petered out.  Now, that my older son is excited about the Bible stories it would have been neat to show him those pictures.  But they disappeared many years ago, perhaps thrown away accidentally during one of my mom's moves.  I wonder if Vince still has his?

Speaking of Elijah, he loves his stuffed animals, just as I did when I was a little kid.  I would love to have been able to dig out those treasured friends--Charlie the clown, Riff Raff the Lion, Gerry the dog, Leonard the leopard and about half dozen more--and share them with my boy.  But they're all gone now.  They may be buried somewhere in my in-laws basement, but I kind of doubt it.

I did a lot of writing and drawing when I was a child and everything is gone.  My picture books on the Civil War and the Plains Indians, the unfinished draft of a novel about a family of beavers, stacks of vivid,densely  detailed pictures of the adventures of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution (yes, I was a major history nerd).  It's especially painful that so much of what I've lost is what I've created, rather than toys or other objects.

More recently I've lost the scripts for all the  plays that I've written.  The lost plays include Before Supper, written in 2000 and staged multiple times between 2000 and 2004 both in Saipan and in Collegedale, TN and the pair of one-act plays I contributed to the Point of Impact collaboration in 2002 with Galvin Deleon Guerrero.

I don't know how it is that I have a closet full of junk and my in-laws full of stuff that I haven't even thought of since 1998, and yet somehow managed to lose the things of real value; things that matter and can't be replaced.

 I'm not sure why losing these things doesn't bother me more than it does.  I'd like to think that it's because in the end, they really are just things.  I'd like to think it's because I'm more grateful for what I still have.  After all these losses are minor compared to losing my health, my loved ones, or my life.  I'm fortunate to have been blessed in this regard, and while I know that if I live long enough I will almost certainly lose all three, I'm grateful to have them thus far.

As for those lost things?  If they are found I will likely "call together my friends and neighbors, saying to them rejoice with me, for I have found that which was lost."