Postcards from the Rogue Valley

I am not one to make New Year’s resolutions, but this year, on the heel of losing my wedding ring — like four out of ten married Americans — I took up a new challenge: encoding. A simpler way to put it is paying more attention. 

When it comes to losing things, the main dynamic goes like this. When we’re focused on something other than the object we’re going to lose, we never really encode the memory about where we’ve put the object because we have other concerns occupying our attention (not necessarily a bad thing).

In a 2017 New Yorker essay, Kathryn Schultz writes about two forms of loss: grief and the misplacement of everyday objects. Regarding the latter, it appears we have a tendency to lose items on a daily basis and spend half a year over the course of our lifetimes searching for them. Schultz writes:

Passwords, passports, umbrellas, scarves, earrings, earbuds, musical instruments, W-2s, that letter you meant to answer, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you’d someday need: the range of things we lose and the readiness with which we do so are staggering.”

Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. Sure, you’ll get many of those items back, but you’ll never retrieve the time spent looking for them. And there’s the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, reportedly thirty billion dollars went to misplaced cell phones alone.

For better or worse, the failure to encode is not just an affliction of the aging brain. It’s multi-generational. During our family gathering this Christmas in Arizona, three-year-old Timmy spent an afternoon searching our Airbnb, muttering to himself, “Where did I put my tablet? Who took it?”

Losing a car

Losing a tablet — or a wedding band — does not compare with losing a car.

Seven years ago, Tony and I sold our house in Rhode Island and moved to Brooklyn to be close to our first grandchild. We rented a three-room, fourth-floor walkup in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, unaware that Brooklyn’s Park Slope carried the nickname “No Park Slope” because finding street parking within a three-minute walk of one’s brownstone apartment counted as a miracle. 

Tony and I often spent 30 minutes circling the neighborhood before we found a legal parking spot for our Honda Fit, blocks from “home.” It was only a matter of time, we figured, before we’d lose our car, unable to remember for the life of us where we’d parked a few nights earlier. 

Not surprsingly, one winter day Tony and I found ourselves fanning “No Park Slope” in search of our grey Fit. We eventually found it, three hours later, nestled between a fire hydrant and a black SUV. Hallelujah. After that, Tony and I made a practice of photographing our parking spot with our iPhone before turning our backs. It wasn’t mind over matter but technology over memory. 

For Tony, one of the allures of Ashland, next to the wide open landscape, was the surety of parking. 

For me, the legacy of losing our car on the streets of Brooklyn was a recurring bad dream, one that replaced my old standby, finding myself taking an exam for a class I never attended. In this new dream, the cities changed, but the plot line remained the same: I can’t remember where I parked my car, I search for hours, I never find it. 

Sometimes my identity seems to disappear with the car.

Why we lose stuff

The full scientific explanation of why we lose stuff comes down to this.

Losing things represents a failure of recollection or, as noted earlier, a failure of attention: either we can’t retrieve a memory (e.g., of where we left our coat) or we didn’t encode one in the first place. 

Difficulty retrieving a memory is a perfectly normal example of “transience,” or the decreasing accessibility of memory over time. A month ago, I spent a half hour looking for the daffodil bulbs I’d ordered back in September, now belatedly ready to plant them. (They were on the floor behind the water heater in our entryway closet.)

Freud, it should be noted, had an alternate explanation for why we lose things: it represents a success. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud describes “the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives,” including “the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from.” Freud’s colleague and contemporary Abraham Arden Brill put the matter more succinctly: “We never lose what we highly value.”

It is true that by the time Tony and I lost our Honda Fit to the streets of Brooklyn, it had collected more dents than we could count. We imagined a new car in our future.

Our reactions

In Schultz’s New Yorker essay, she examines closely our reactions to losing things. Our first response, understandably, is to want to know where it is. But behind that question about location lurks a question about causality: What happened to it? What agent or force made it disappear? 

When automatic teller machines first came into existence, they (at least the one at my bank) would disburse the cash first, the bank card second. On my first two ATM visits, I took the crisp 20s but forgot my card; I didn’t even process that I’d left it behind. When I couldn’t find the card later, I applied for a new one, wondering what force had made it disappear. Happily, I remembered to remove my card on my third visit to the ATM, solving the mystery.

Just as important, the answers to what happened can provide us with a sense of closure. “It is good to get your keys back, better still to understand how they wound up in your neighbor’s recycling bin,” quips Schultz.

But questions about causality can also lead to trouble, because, at bottom, they ask us to assign blame. Being human, we’re often reluctant to assign it to ourselves, and it is always possible (though rare) that someone else caused an item to disappear. This is how a problem with an object turns into a problem with a person. My husband has a bad habit of saying “where did you put it” when something of his goes missing rather than “where did it go.”

Given that nine times out of ten we are to blame for losing whatever it is that we can’t find, blaming others is a bold act of outsourcing. Nearly always, we are both villain and victim in the drama of vanishing objects, Schultz reminds us.

Questioning ourselves

Why does losing things drive us crazy? At best, our failure to locate something we ourselves last handled suggests that our memory has left us; at worst, it calls into question our very knowledge of our self. If you’ve ever lost something that you deliberately stashed away for safekeeping, you know that the ensuing frustration stems not just from a failure of memory but from a failure to think like yourself, to answer the question, “Where would I have put it?”

I have a penchant for re-organizing. I might move a pair of pants I wear infrequently from my dresser to the closet in the spare bedroom or relocate the measuring spoons from the kitchen drawer where they’d been since we moved to Ashland to a new drawer. I might transfer a file that’s been on my desktop for ages to a folder labelled “Personal” on my external hard drive. You know what happens later as these re-organizing decisions fade.

“Regardless of what goes missing, loss puts us in our place,” says Schultz. “It confronts us with lack of order and loss of control and the fleeting nature of existence.”

This entanglement becomes more distressing as we grow older. “We reach a point where every act of losing gets subjected to an extra layer of scrutiny, in case what you have actually lost is your mind,” Schultz continues. When three-year-old Timmy’s mother loses her keys or her phone, common for her, I breathe a sigh of relief. “It can happen at any age,” I reassure myself.

What we leave out

Sometimes I wonder if our problem is not that we put too many items into the lost category but that we leave too many out — things that belonged to a moment in time, that we took for granted, that slipped away, that were fragile.

They might include the surprises of visiting a place for the first time. The long gone practice of borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor when we suddenly run out. The willow tree that graced a nearby field and succumbed to old age. The first time we voted. The day we mastered riding a bike. Curiosity. Balance. A sense of purpose. 

When I gave up looking for my wedding ring and adopted the wider gold band I’d inherited from my stepmother, with whom I wasn’t close, I retrieved something more important: the memory of the blazing summer day, 45 years ago, when Tony and I exchanged rings to the bravos of his extended family in a small villa set among olive trees in Apulia, Italy. An unlikely union, we pledged not only sturdy love but also to notice and cherish, to pay attention, to guard fragility.

My New Year’s resolution, I realize as I write this, goes well beyond keeping better track of my “things.” It includes treasuring.

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