I recently lost the small bone-handled pocketknife pictured above. The last time I remember seeing it was opening the Chewy box for Pip, our ancient, blind, diabetic, Black Lab for whom we are acting as seeing-eye humans and hospice-care-workers. Don’t feel too sorry for Pip. In my next life I want to come back in her situation  ̶  two adults hovering over me, catering to my every whim, trying to interpret every little half-bark or sleep-squeak I make.

Billie and I sometimes just look at each other, and say laughing, “These are our golden years?”

Back to the lost pocketknife. I’ve looked everywhere. Under the washing machine and dryer in the laundry where I opened the box. In the garbage where I threw away the box and bag the food came in. I’ve looked in all my pants pockets and combed the yard, thinking I might have dropped it on a Pip poop-pee walk  ̶  she never goes very far these days. I’ve been down on my belly looking under furniture in every room with my phone as a flashlight, and with multiple other brighter flashlights. I’ve done this several times.

My father always said that “a man should have a pocketknife in his pocket.” This may be the only piece of fatherly advice I ever followed. Oh, well,  that and “Don’t grow up. Adulthood is overrated.”  So I maintain a small collection of inexpensive vintage every-day-carry (ERC) jackknives.

This isn’t the first pocketknife I’ve lost. I lost a Victorinox Huntsman Swiss Army knife near a hot spring in the Colorado Rockies. I lost a Kutmaster that might have been my grandfather Harry’s when mice chewed a hole in my jeans pocket because I left Pip’s dog biscuits in the pocket overnight. There were others too, that trauma lost to the erosion of memory over time.

I am coming to the conclusion that this knife is lost. It wasn’t expensive. I’m pretty sure I paid under $5 for it at the garage sale where I bought it. I’m not sure why I’m so obsessed with finding it, except that I liked it, and I hate to lose things.

I hold on to stuff. I have the guitar that was my 13^th birthday present. I gave away the Raleigh bicycle that was my 12^th birthday present in 2003, when it was 44 years old. I still regret that.

I don’t lose much, but there are enough regretted missing things that I have a personal mythology about lost items. Gremlins!  Some  small pesky creature steals my stuff and hides it. If it is one of those lost items that I look for obsessively and then “find” in the same place I’ve looked a hundred times, then the Gremlins put it back there.

Billie says “when you die, you get back all the things that you lost.”  I think it’s a joke, but I find that comforting. She can be hard-nosed and no nonsense. She is operations and maintenance in our household; I am only the occasional Mr. Fix-it. However, she has a paranormal methodology for finding lost items. “Stop looking. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and call it. Tell the item you’d like it to come back and then wait.”

I have a bifurcated personality, one half, “MBA Alan” is firmly rooted in the “real world,” and thinks that “call it” bit is “woo-woo.” The other half I call “Nature-Boy” or “Quantum Alan” isn’t at all surprised when her methodology works.

My niece by marriage, Brenda,  was raised Catholic, and calls upon St. Anthony to help her find lost items. I was raised in a devout Christian Science family, where people routinely said “Nothing is lost in God’s kingdom.” I guess it’s all similar.

I do things to protect myself from loss. I put things in the same place. Keys on the key rack. When I traveled for work, I staged everything in the hotel room, preparing for what was always a rushed pack-up on the last day, and ensuring nothing was left behind. Wallet, phone, Kindle, chargers, were placed on the table next to the bed, my house keys in the suitcase outer pocket, air ticket and boarding passes, once in my suit jacket pocket with my passport, then later on my phone.

It is about mindfulness and focus, which is why when the gremlins get me, I feel bad because, for just a moment, I was unfocused and not mindful and lost an item entrusted to my care.

It’s just stuff. It’s just a material object, so feeling bad, isn’t grief, is it? It isn’t like losing a loved one or even a pet. It isn’t like having a friend who is lost after a firing, or divorce, or substance abuse.

It isn’t like feeling lost yourself, when you wake up and feel disconnected from any semblance of purpose in your life. It isn’t like feeling lost because of events or people at work, or in your neighborhood, or country, or the world, are doing things you disagree with, and you don’t know what on earth you might do about it.

Maybe Billie is right. “Call to the lost,” Maybe the act of focusing on and verbalizing what we want is a good first step.

So “come back little knife,”. . . please.

Come “Purpose,” come “Sobriety.” Come on “Kindness,” “Abundance” and “World Peace.”  You are missed and would be welcomed home.

Otherwise, I’ll see you when I die, when all the lost things resurface. “Nothing is lost in God’s Kingdom.” So bring it back, Gremlins!