Lost in the Valley

The human being is a flute which makes music when the breath of God blows through … Rumi

I am such a loser.

By that I don’t mean to imply that I have low self-esteem or anything like that. What I mean is that I am constantly misplacing things.

One year at Thanksgiving dinner, my grandmother’s home was all decked out with seasonal knick-knacks. I was probably about ten years old and had my eye on a little wax-turkey candle decoration and, being somewhat precocious (more accurately “avaricious”, but I was too young and innocent to know the difference) I asked my grandmother if I could have it.

“Well,” she said, “You’re just going to lose it, but OK, you can have it.”

Well, I took that as a personal challenge and so I took it home and put it on a shelf and never touched it. Every time she came to visit, I would drag her down to the basement to my room and show her I still had that turkey. Hah! Lose her turkey, indeed; double HAH!

Of course I have no idea where it is now. I guess she’s probably up in heaven chuckling over that.

Anyway, last Christmas my wife gave me a knife to replace one that had disappeared. It was a nice Swiss army knife with a number of blades and gizmos. I’d had it for years and then, sometime last fall, it went missing. I didn’t lose it, you understand. It went missing.

I knew exactly where I had last seen it, but it wasn’t there. I’ve checked everywhere for it and it is nowhere to be found. It is somewhere – of that I am sure, but today it is apparently caught in a crack of the time-space continuum that surrounds us on every side. No doubt it is being held hostage by all those single socks that have “gotten lost” since time immemorial.

Anyway, I digress. Barb knew my distress at having had my old knife run away from home, so she bought me a new knife for Christmas. It is nice and red, has the cute little cross emblem I love, and all the blades, gadgets, and gizmos the old knife had. It’s not exactly the same as the old knife – and it will never cut the emotional ties I had with my first multi-use pocket knife – but it is a worthy successor.

That’s why – horror of horrors – I was horrified to discover my new knife had gone missing barely a month “out of the box”! I looked everywhere for it and, like the first knife, it was nowhere to be found.

I knew at that moment I was a dead man walking. I have a sweet, loving, doting wife; that’s all true. But I kept hearing my grandmother’s voice echoing between my ears: “You’re just going to lose it …”

So I did what any sane man would do – not that I am sane, but I put myself in the shoes of a sane man and said, OK, that’ll work – I kept my mouth shut. I checked my clothes, the laundry, my offices, under the bed, under the couch where I sit (and between the cushions), and – nothing!

A week or two passed and there was a commercial on TV for a thing that fits between a car seat and center consul (to catch coins, cell phones, and valuables). A three watt bulb lit up over my head in a badly drawn cartoon bubble. I grabbed my flashlight (which has a few more candles of illuminating power) and checked the space in the car between the driver’s seat and center consul and VOILA! I found m’knife!

It turns out that it isn’t safe for me to carry a knife while wearing dress slacks. I know I will likely be cast out from Montana for wearing an article of clothing that was outlawed since forever; I’m pretty sure denim is the state cloth. Still, separation of church and state means I can wear my church pants, even if it also means separation of man and knife.

I think people are like pocket knives. We may get lost for a time, but God never stops looking for us; God smiles when we’re safely back in the palm of his hand. I find that comforting in this, our valley. I hope grandma does, too.