Anybody else ready for winter to end? Yea I thought so me too. I have to admit that we're much closer to the end of winter than the beginning of it, but this stretch of time when one day blurs into the next for days on end is so much tougher than in the beginning, when we are kind of eased into the season with the various holidays that we actually look forward to like Halloween, Thanksgiving and Kwanzaa.
Maybe it's a coincidence, that during these dog days of winter, (or is it "cat" days of winter?) where I really, really start to lose my mind. Specifically, I've been losing my wallet lately. Not misplacing it, but flat out losing it, only to have the great lucky fortune of having it be found by a kind stranger or in the last place I'd look, (as if I'd keep looking after I found it)
I think a lot of the reasons I'm losing it in the first place is because I'm usually doing something outside of my routine, like getting up early in the morning to move the car out of the parking garage to some far off corner of the borough where I can leave it there without paying. Or going across the street to the YMCA to workout for an hour. In both examples my wallet is not going into my right rear pocket like it does every morning of every day when I work, but it's going into a pocket in my sweat pants, or a pocket in a pullover which leads me to be lose track of it if it falls out into the snow covered streets without making a sound.
It should be known that I've yet to lose my iPhone, as that little collection of silicon chips might as well be surgically implanted into the palm of my hand at this point. Yet twice now in the last two weeks I've gone through the exercise of turning the apartment upside down, and retracing my steps through the streets of West Chester to see if I might come upon it, laying on the sidewalk, undisturbed, as if somehow I prearranged to meet my wallet here at some future point like the meeting of old friends in town for a drink.
I even go through the steps of bringing the spiritual world into the process, by reaching out to Saint Anthony of Padua, the Patron Saint of lost things. I'm sure I got started on that kick by my mom, back when my GI Joe's head would somehow become liberated from the rest of his body. She'd have me pray to him to help me find it, and sure enough, sooner or later I would find it inexplicably buried in the sand box in the back yard in some sort of ritual warning to the other GI Joe's to stay out of enemy territory. I mean it's kind of silly when you think about it, to check in with a celestial lost and found, but hey, I'm not taking any chances.
You know the thing of it is, I could probably avoid all the hysterics, by making my wallet as exciting as the glove compartment in my car by reducing it to a simple carrying case for money, ID and credit cards only, as all of those can be replaced pretty easily in this day and age. But I've got some really personal things in there, like my old Military ID, long since expired, my PADI Dive certification card that's still good, but, it's got a great picture of me being 21 years old at the time that I got dive qualified. Finally it's got a picture of Lana and a lucky dollar bill that she gave me when she gave me the wallet, the first of many gifts she has given me throughout the years. (and I hope many gifts she will continue to shower me with in the years to come.)
That's what makes the wallet almost irreplaceable, it's a bit of the nostalgia I've got going on in there, and the sense of the future that's there too. Plenty of room for pictures of the kid(s) that may happen one of these days.
So, if you have to be walking up and down High Street, and you see a black leather wallet sitting on the sidewalk, would you stop by the Greentree Building and drop it off? No questions asked, reward if returned.
Maybe it's a coincidence, that during these dog days of winter, (or is it "cat" days of winter?) where I really, really start to lose my mind. Specifically, I've been losing my wallet lately. Not misplacing it, but flat out losing it, only to have the great lucky fortune of having it be found by a kind stranger or in the last place I'd look, (as if I'd keep looking after I found it)
I think a lot of the reasons I'm losing it in the first place is because I'm usually doing something outside of my routine, like getting up early in the morning to move the car out of the parking garage to some far off corner of the borough where I can leave it there without paying. Or going across the street to the YMCA to workout for an hour. In both examples my wallet is not going into my right rear pocket like it does every morning of every day when I work, but it's going into a pocket in my sweat pants, or a pocket in a pullover which leads me to be lose track of it if it falls out into the snow covered streets without making a sound.
It should be known that I've yet to lose my iPhone, as that little collection of silicon chips might as well be surgically implanted into the palm of my hand at this point. Yet twice now in the last two weeks I've gone through the exercise of turning the apartment upside down, and retracing my steps through the streets of West Chester to see if I might come upon it, laying on the sidewalk, undisturbed, as if somehow I prearranged to meet my wallet here at some future point like the meeting of old friends in town for a drink.
I even go through the steps of bringing the spiritual world into the process, by reaching out to Saint Anthony of Padua, the Patron Saint of lost things. I'm sure I got started on that kick by my mom, back when my GI Joe's head would somehow become liberated from the rest of his body. She'd have me pray to him to help me find it, and sure enough, sooner or later I would find it inexplicably buried in the sand box in the back yard in some sort of ritual warning to the other GI Joe's to stay out of enemy territory. I mean it's kind of silly when you think about it, to check in with a celestial lost and found, but hey, I'm not taking any chances.
You know the thing of it is, I could probably avoid all the hysterics, by making my wallet as exciting as the glove compartment in my car by reducing it to a simple carrying case for money, ID and credit cards only, as all of those can be replaced pretty easily in this day and age. But I've got some really personal things in there, like my old Military ID, long since expired, my PADI Dive certification card that's still good, but, it's got a great picture of me being 21 years old at the time that I got dive qualified. Finally it's got a picture of Lana and a lucky dollar bill that she gave me when she gave me the wallet, the first of many gifts she has given me throughout the years. (and I hope many gifts she will continue to shower me with in the years to come.)
That's what makes the wallet almost irreplaceable, it's a bit of the nostalgia I've got going on in there, and the sense of the future that's there too. Plenty of room for pictures of the kid(s) that may happen one of these days.
So, if you have to be walking up and down High Street, and you see a black leather wallet sitting on the sidewalk, would you stop by the Greentree Building and drop it off? No questions asked, reward if returned.
