I live in the Land of the Lost. No, I don’t share a cave with Marshall, Will and Holly, nor do I play slow-motion games of “chase” with the neighborhood Sleestaks, but nevertheless, I live in the Land of the Lost–lost shoes, lost homework, lost lunch boxes, etc. As befits a citizen of the Land of the Lost, most of my time is spent practicing the (also) lost art of “looking.” (“Lost” at least, it would seem, to my fellow citizens.) Sometimes entire days will go by when I do nothing but search for one “vital” lost item after another, until the various nooks and crannies of my house are as drearily familiar to me as the frozen food section at Bashas’. (Here’s a question: if you have something that you consider “vital” to your health and happiness–such as a completed homework assignment–wouldn’t you make sure not to leave it in the backyard during the monsoon season? Or, if you had a favorite stuffed animal–one that had to be in place for sleep to occur–wouldn’t you leave it on your bed where you could find it? It seems to me that to do anything else would be ridiculous–as ridiculous as say, leaving 30,000 guns lying around a country filled with hostile insurgents. Although, on second thought, perhaps that’s not the best example.)
Sometimes it gets so bad that I think that maybe I’m being punished for being forgetful in a former life, and, in a way, I suppose I am: after all, aren’t all parents being punished for the crimes they committed during their former lives as children? At least when I was a child, though, the things that I was looking for were the things that I, myself, had lost; with this current losing streak we’re living through the things I’m looking for are things in which I played no part in misplacing. And what’s worse: when it comes to the current crop of lost items, not only am I a member of the search party; all too often I am the search party.
Forget having my six-year-old son, Clyde, help look: he’s about as helpful as Spicoli (“I have a jacket? No way–what does it look like?”). And as for Clementine–well, since lately everything in her life seems to play out like the last scene in a Greek tragedy, most of her “looking” consists of long, bitter lamentations at the very idea of the object going missing in the first place ( “Oh heartless Universe: why have you once more riven my jacket from me?” Sort of a “Rage, rage against the dying of the light (blue jacket)” moment for the pre-pubescent set.) An alternate tack for her is to blame the loss on her little brother. Unfortunately, the same trait that renders him unsuitable for looking duties also makes him unfit as a scapegoat: “What? You used to have a jacket, too? Awesome!” (see Spicoli, ibid.)
One might think that, saddled as I am with two such unhelpful lookers, I could at least count on the services of the one other adult in my house–my husband–for help. One might think that, but then, one would be wrong, because if children are like Spicoli reborn, then husbands are like Spicoli grown up. How else would you explain that mine’s usual response to any and all appeals to help form a search party for missing library books, glasses, iPods, etc. is an infuriating: “Relax. It’ll turn up eventually.” (Yes, but I don’t need it eventually: I need it today).
Come to think of it, looking back on those old Land of the Lost episodes it now becomes painfully obvious why it was that they could never escape: it wasn’t because the portal back into their own world was too hard to find; it was because they didn’t have a mother there to look for it.