The birth of an obsession

Over three days, I have plundered purses, closets, couches, pockets, trunks, drawers, coffee shops, and cars for my huge wad of keys and plastic discount coupon cards, jammed onto my red climbing clip adorned with a Vera Bradley plaster-covered fabric swatch. And now, my 4th Kindle has disappeared as well, chock full of novels. It doesn't help a rip, but I have vivid images of my keys and Kindle, and I can even feel them in my hand. My latest search, in a local coffee shop where I was SURE they were in a lost and found box, has failed, and now comes the steady drip of anxiety. If I don't turn it off, I will begin an even more thorough search back in time and space. This will take up time I don't have, and begin to feel ridiculous. Everything can be replaced, and not even expensively. Why am I letting these lost items drive my day? The answer lies buried deep in the winter of 1959, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the story begins with the United States Treasury's School Stamp Savings Program, a hold-over from War Bonds. Parents got little booklets with blank squares to be covered over with purchased ten-cent stamps, usually in a strip of four stamps. Once the book was filled, a patriotic mother like mine, who well remembered War Bonds, and her brother fighting Over There, would turn the booklet in for money. I was 11, in the sixth grade, wore mittens, and loved playing in the snow on the way home. Who wouldn't? There was so much of it. The snow was so deep, and the snow piles from shoveling sidewalks so huge, that children cavorting home from school on icy, snowy sidewalks could barely be seen by mothers peering out of living room windows. Only their little wool caps, which moved mysteriously along as if disembodied from little heads. I had the stamps in my hand, having scooped them off the table manned by the Stamp Lady who showed up on Friday afternoons. When I reached the side door, all frosty-breathless,the stamps were gone. My mother immediately frisked me for the Saving Stamps, plundering my pockets, and my navy cloth gym bag. My wan must-have-dropped-them comment sent her into a rage, and she ordered me back to school, to trace my steps. She closed the side door with a bang, leaving me shocked and speechless on a late afternoon, the dusk unspooling quickly, the snow turning a dusky blue-grey. I half ran back toward school, my head down like a dog looking for food. School was at least 12 long blocks away. I'm sure I was crying, and sniffling. The sidewalks were icing over. I dreaded running into schoolmates like snowball heaving boys. When I reached the school, the door to my wing was locked, and the hall was darkened. A light was on in the principal's office, at the front of the building, but I dared not face another authority. Instead I ran back home, my head down once again, blood-hounding the sidewalk with my eyes, stepping around fresh dog poop and pee left by early evening walkers, finding only a ball-point pen, and candy wrappers. My memory ends there. I don't know what happened when I got home, only that I assumed MY WHOLE LIFE that my mother had been trying to teach me a lesson about the importance of money. It didn't work. Probably because she went too far shaming me, I am not good with money, nor with minding my stuff. I do though churn up mounds of misery when I lose something. I retrace my steps meticulously, with about as much success as quarters in a slot machine. Stuff, but not shame, just disappears.