Flip-flops, we hardly knew ye! You were so cute, with those wee appliqué rosettes all along your tops, and so new. And kind of pricey, for flip-flops, like thirty dollars. But now you are gone, because I left you somewhere—under someone’s dinner table, or under the backseat of someone’s car, or at the beach.
It hurts to think of you smothered in snow now, or bobbing in frigid black waves in the middle of the ocean. What a disservice to both of us. It pains me, and leaves me with so many questions, starting with, how did I get home with no shoes on?
Umbrellas and beach towels, earbuds and cell phone chargers and tubes of toothpaste—everyone leaves these things places. One of the charming things about life is how certain items become a kind of communal property, less owned than permanently passed around. I’m the Johnny Appleseed of drugstore reading glasses, but so is everyone else.
Thanks to others’ absentmindedness, I have more brands of shampoo and conditioner in my shower than a CVS, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually had to buy an umbrella. There are always plenty at my house, and not just those crummy ones you buy from the guys on the street during a downpour and that flip inside out with the first puff of wind. Serious ones, with polished wooden handles and canopies sturdy enough to withstand a tornado. The umbrellas change constantly, but my stash stays magically replenished—I leave one somewhere, and another shows up.
I’m partial to the pair of hand-carved African wooden salad spoons someone left at my house after he or she brought, presumably, salad to dinner a few years ago. I figure that if whoever left them isn’t okay with my keeping them, he or she would have traced them to me by now and taken them back.
“Oh, crap, I left those salad servers at Jenny’s,” some wife probably said to some husband. “Now I’ll have to call her and go over there and get them. And I really don’t have time for her to talk my ear off today.”
“So forget it. They weren’t even ours anyway. My sister says they’re hers.”
“That’s great! One less thing for me to do. Your sister thinks everything is hers, by the way.”
(I have to say here that Tupperware seems to be the one exception to this rule. Have you noticed how ferocious people are about their Tupperware? “And I want this Tupperware back,” they say darkly, handing you the guacamole they brought for the picnic. Like your picnic idea was just a ruse to get your hands on their plastic food containers.)
In terms of leaving things places, though, I feel like I’m in another, more troubling, league. Teenaged mothers and their druggy boyfriends hang on to those collapsible baby strollers longer than I used to. Mine were left behind, carelessly, in the trunks of many taxis. There are cabdrivers’ children all over New York, I hope, who were happily wheeled around in those strollers for years.
Perfectly good sweaters and jackets and coats of mine are strewn up and down the Eastern Seaboard—left on the backs of chairs in libraries, on the hooks of bathroom doors in hotels, on those above-the-seat luggage racks on Amtrak. Recently, I left a coat at my friend Lynne’s house, and when I tried to go back the next day to get it, I couldn’t, because I’d left my car at her house too. Someone else had given me a ride home. I’d forgotten.
I was going to brag here that I have never left the tools of my trade—my reporter’s notebook with the scribbled notes of an interview, the legal pads I write on, my laptop—anywhere and tell you how I keep them in whatever tote bag I’m passing off as a purse at the moment, and how I keep that purse attached to my shoulder at all times when I travel, so terrified am I of leaving it somewhere. Which is true. Then I remembered that I left a laptop on the ferry from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard once. Thank you, whoever you are, for bringing it to the Steamship Authority’s lost and found!
Sometimes I preemptively leave things—that is, before they’re even in my hands. Here is how I buy the newspaper at a newsstand: I pay for it and walk away. If it’s my local newsstand, where the guy knows me, I can go back later and claim it, but if it’s not, I don’t. I’ve tried; I sound like I’m scamming the newsstand guy, and even I don’t believe me.
Years ago, I bought eighty dollars’ worth of live lobster at a fish store on Martha’s Vineyard. I put the bag on top of the car while I opened the car door, and then I left the bag on top of the car and drove away. Minutes later, I heard something slide off my car and checked my rearview mirror: There was the bag of lobster, by the side of the road. By the time I’d turned around and returned to the spot, the bag was gone, snatched up by some enterprising person. I deserved it.
I know what you’re thinking: This woman must be drunk all the time. That would be the obvious answer, and if it were true, at least I’d have the comfort of knowing I was wasted when I did these things. But I had to give up drinking some years ago. This is me, high functioning! Truly, I shudder to think of the state I’d be in if I still drank. Shoeless, coatless, probably clothesless, lurching around in an old blanket. If this trend continues, I’ll be like one of those Buddhist mendicants, wandering the world with just my robes and an alms bowl. Except I’ll probably leave the alms bowl somewhere.
* * *
Theories about why I leave everything everywhere:
1. I subconsciously want to return to the place where I left the item.
I like the psychoanalytic ring of this, but I never want to go back to the Hauppauge Holiday Inn Express on I-495 on Long Island, where I left the power cord for my computer last summer—once was enough, I swear. I never, ever want to return anywhere on Long Island after I’m forced to go there for some reason—the less time I spend there, I find, the happier I am—and I never miss the subway car where I’ve left a bag of groceries or the birthday present I’m bringing to a party.
2. I feel guilty about owning things while others do without.
I don’t think so. I don’t own that many things, at least not compared to other people I know. My parents had a kind of prewar thriftiness; they may have sent their children to fancy colleges, but they never threw out a rubber band. I grew up thinking that owning three pairs of shoes at one time (sneakers, regular shoes, “party” shoes) was my lucky lot in life, and I’ve never really shaken that off.
For example, my friend Deborah came to stay with me for a week last summer. Her last night, on our way out to dinner, I asked her if I looked all right. “Um, do you have another skirt?” she said. Apparently, I’d worn the same one every day of her visit. And when friends tell me they’ve bought, say, a sweater in two different colors because they like it so much, I’m always a little shocked, and secretly worry that they have a shopping “problem.”
3. I have other, more important things on my mind.
I can’t tell you how much I wish this were true, but I’m usually thinking about what’s in the refrigerator for lunch, or whether the mean lady clerk at my post office has a diagnosable mood disorder or just doesn’t like me.
4. I have ADD.
Ah, a diagnosis! That would be great. It sounds so much better than “scatty.” But everyone has ADD. If you don’t think you do, just google it. You do, you’ll see.
5. I’m not that bright.
Yes, well, this one has the ring of truth. I help out at a weekly drama class for intellectually challenged adults, and I swear, every participant is sharper than me. In one of the “observation” games we play, we close our eyes and try to remember what the other people in the group are wearing.
“Let’s see,” they’ll say, “Janet has on a plaid Eddie Bauer shirt, jeans with a black cowboy belt, and navy-blue running shoes with white trim and Velcro straps, and Brad is wearing a dark green BLACK DOG T-shirt with a tiny hole on the shoulder and khaki pants with cuffs, and Top-Siders. And striped socks.”
When my turn comes, I say, “Dave has on … uh … boots?”
And at the end of class, they hand me the cell phone and sweater I’ve left on a chair.
* * *
Never mind, I guess. I do the best I can, and sometimes a miracle happens. Not long ago, I was browsing at the Dumptique, the big shed at our local dump where people leave their used clothes and books and other people take them for free, and I found a lovely plaid Egyptian-cotton button-down Perry Ellis shirt. I was so happy—it was a perfect replacement for the similar plaid button-down Perry Ellis shirt I’d given up for lost years earlier. Then I noticed that the shirt had three letters printed inside the collar, the way Chinese laundries print your name, and that the letters were the same as the first three letters of my last name, and—well, you know the rest.
And last year, on my way from a commuter train to a fund-raising dinner on Long Island (so much for staying away from there), I changed from my everyday shoes into high heels in the suburban cab, and then I left the shoes in the cab. My friend Polly, who was also going to the dinner, took the same cab an hour later and found the shoes on its floor.
“That’s amazing!” I said as she held them out to me. “How did you know these were mine?”
“You’re kidding, right?” she said.