Losing it

I’m a loser.

Specifically, I’m one of those people who loses his keys, wallet, sunglasses, etc., regularly. As in three or four times a day. 

I never put them down in the same place. Consequently, when I need to go somewhere I have to enlist my wife’s assistance to find them. This pisses her off. She has never lost anything and, at any given moment, knows where every one of her possessions is, from the crown she won as Miss Teenage Quincy 1967 (on the far left top shelf of the guest room closet) to the gold sequined uniform she wore as a college baton twirler (in a box labeled “Golden Girl outfit” in the attic).

You’d think that after 37 years she would have accepted she married a loser and would be cheerful about helping me find whatever I’ve lost but she never is. Sometimes she’s downright nasty about it. That hurts my feelings because she knows it’s not my fault. It’s genetic. My entire family – mother, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins and (this is Biblical) her own children – are losers, too. Our penchant for misplacing things is attributable to a flawed gene inherited from my great-great grandparents who, legend has it, lost their dining room table, milk cow and one of their children while driving a covered wagon from North Carolina to Missouri shortly after the Civil War. 

None of my blood relatives sees the need to devote brain cells to remembering inconsequential things like the location of keys because we a) know they’ll eventually turn up and b) tend to co-habit with people who love us despite our penchant for losing things and are adept at finding them for us. 

This time I may have driven my wife over the edge. We’re packing up our house, which has sold and is scheduled to close late next month. Before we put the house on the market we rented a storage unit to stash important possessions  – boxes of financial records, plastic crates filled with the boys’ Legos, the 400 or so vintage advertising posters I've acquired over the years and the two six-feet-tall plush Bart and Lisa Simpson dolls our youngest son won at a school carnival 20 years ago. The realtor irrationally claimed they made the basement look cluttered. 

The key to the storage unit was carefully placed on an electronic “fob” that remotely starts our SUV. The SUV came with two fobs but I lost one the week after we bought it and, ever since, my wife has insisted on keeping the remaining fob in her purse.

Friday morning I needed to back the SUV out of the garage to make room for the 30 or so bags of stuff we’re planning to take to Goodwill. I took the fob from my wife’s purse and backed the SUV into the driveway.

The fob hasn’t been seen since. We spent hours looking for it yesterday when we decided to go clean out the storage unit.

The search is extra complicated this time because nothing in the house is where it's supposed to be. There are half-filled packing boxes in every room, along with all those bags destined for Goodwill in the garage. We’ve turned the place upside-down and inside-out but the damned fob is gone. We thought it might have somehow wound up in one of the Goodwill bags. My wife suggested that, because the fob emits a beam that starts the car, I could simply load the bags one at a time into the passenger seat and push the “start “button. If the car started, it would be a sure thing the fob was in one of those bags. I did but … no signal.

So, there’s an SUV in the driveway we can’t start and a storage unit we can’t access. If we don’t find that fob soon the buyer of this house will be getting a nice (but undrivable) 2009 Infiniti SUV and we’ll be paying in perpetuity the $350 monthly rent on a storage unit we can’t open.

Here’s my theory as to what happened: We were at the storage unit Wednesday. Someone must have walked past it while our backs were turned. He or she saw those stuffed Simpsons dolls … coveted them ... followed us home … broke in to the house Friday night as we slept … stole the fob with key to the unit from the table in the front hall where I’m almost sure I placed it … and was then, when exiting the house, eaten by a bear, one of which was seen in town within the last few years. 

That’s the only possible explanation. My wife isn’t buying it but I think it makes perfect sense.

Don’t you?