Julie Seedorf, Something About Nothing

I lost something. I hid it somewhere where no one else would find it. The problem is that I can’t find it either.

There is a possibility that someone else found it. If they did, it would be long gone. But I have to believe that I hid it so well and then my brain forgot where I hid it.

It isn’t an important item. Well, that statement depends on how hungry a person is for chocolate. So if you do not have a chocolate craving, then it is not an important item.

We had a parade in our community. The parade happens to pass by my home so we are very comfortable and close to my home in case I want to hide any of the candy I catch in the parade from the eyes of my grandchildren. That is a little lie. My grandchildren get plenty of candy. I hide my candy from my husband. We happen to have the same chocolate tastes, and if I leave my chocolate sit around, it happens to disappear and usually “I didn’t take it” is the culprit.

I carefully hid the lapful of candy that I was specifically given by a member of the parade. Since it was dumped directly into my lap and it was Hershey bars, I felt vindicated for hiding it since it was supposed to be mine. But the joke is on me. I can’t find it.

There are many people who start their Christmas shopping for the next year right after Christmas. I always wonder how many of them can find those Christmas gifts once Christmas rolls around 11 months later.

I am still in my paring-down phase and along with that comes organization. However, I have found that I function much better in my disorganized space. I actually can find things when my space is not organized. When I have a place for everything and everything in its place, I have a hard time remembering where that place is. The chocolate I am sure is in the candy place wherever that is in my organized office.

I was looking for peanut butter in my cupboard. I couldn’t find it. My “finder helper” asked me if I possibly had put it in the refrigerator after I had used it last. The “finder helper” just automatically assumed that if it was in the refrigerator, then I was the person who had put it there. In reality we have another person in my household who puts things away. I use that term loosely because when the “finder helper” puts his things away, he can’t find them either.

The “finder helper” is more silent about misplaced items than I am. I find him peering closely at items around the house, mainly tabletops and countertops. The reason he is peering closely is because he can’t see. It is his glasses he has misplaced. In his silence, he is hoping I don’t notice.

Because we are “older,” we maybe should be concerned about our misplacing things but I am not. I have been doing it all my life. I misplace things when I am in a hurry and toss and hide without concentrating where I am tossing and hiding. My chocolate is misplaced because of the chaos of people in my house at the time and my hurry at getting the chocolate of sight of those that have chocolate radar. The peanut butter probably was in the refrigerator because “finder helper” was helping himself to peanut butter at the same time he was watching his important game on the TV set.

I thought I would look up the statistics on misplacing things. If you type that into Google you get many entries, and they all relate to Alzheimer’s disease. I am familiar with that disease since both my mother-in-law and my mother were diagnosed with that disease. It is not unusual for older people to worry that the onset of Alzheimer’s is what is happening to them when forgetfulness plagues them. It is something to be concerned about, and you should possibly to talk to your doctor if it worries you.

I always seem to find what I have misplaced. It usually takes a few minutes of quiet and meditation and sometimes a prayer, and then I find it right where I put it. And I then remember why I chose that place.

In our hurried world our brains are spinning so fast that we don‘t take the time to concentrate on a face, a name or a hiding place. People flash in our vision for just a second when we meet them while our brain is on our way to the next task. Our keys get dumped in the fastest place as we are on our way to answer the phone, start dinner or throw in a new load of clothes.

We can’t remember what we had for lunch because we gulped it down as we are running errands so we will get back to work on time.

We don’t stop and savor the moment as we hide the chocolate. We don’t zero in on the face and put it with the name when we are talking to someone. We don’t savor every bite of that delicious lunch. We let our brain spin out of control.

Like a circle in a spiral,

Like a wheel within a wheel,

Never ending or beginning,

On an ever-spinning reel.

As the images unwind,

Like the circles that you find,

In the windmills of your mind.

(Excerpt taken from song “Windmills On My Mind.”)

Now what was I writing about?

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send e-mail to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net. Her blog is paringdown.wordpress.com. Listen to KBEW AM radio 1:30 p.m. Sundays for “Something About Nothing.”