Today I spent an hour standing in a Buellton parking lot with my hand on a supermarket cart whose grocery contents included melting ice cream. It was my shopping cart, a home base in a world of shifting sands, but I hoped this wasn't a foreshadowing of my future.
Somehow in the brief distance and time between exiting my car and shopping for groceries, I had lost my car key. I had lost it so entirely that retracing my steps through every aisle of the store, poring through the produce, peering into my car windows, and even poking around beneath the car all yielded not a trace. I asked store managers, checkout people, random employees, and customers. Absolutely no one had seen my key. I searched until I could no longer reimagine myself tucking it into my purse or even recall what it felt like in my hands. I would have doubted its very existence if not for its essential role in my automobile's undisputed presence in the lot.
I know. These things happen. But lately they have been happening to me too often. Objects vanish into thin air. Attention and intentions meander. Commitments slip between cracks. Things go bump in broad daylight. Words and facts elude me. There’s so much losing, so much loss.