a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Sunday, August 9, 2020

Of loss and the lost

I know I promised to write this time about the art I'm framing, gathered from trips abroad, but I can't settle into that right now, though the two photographs, painting and poster are laid out in front of me, their inspirations still vibrating.  What is on my mind has been almost life-changing; but if that sounds like hyperbole, I can't blame you for thinking so...so much is overblown these days (think about that poor word amazing, which has lost its true meaning with every inexact stab; life-changing, like incredible, fails that way, as well).  But hear me out.


A week and a day ago, carrying Alexander to the Farm for an afternoon swim, rushing first to get him on his feet and ready for our reservation (in these days of distancing and caution we have to sign up for a place in the pool), I forgot, while I changed into my suit, to remove my necklace.  We were in the pool, diving under water and playing Alexander's game of Torpedo, when I suddenly said to him,  "Oops!  You wait here by the pool side, while I go up to put this in my bag."


I dropped the necklace in the deep well of (oh, look! here comes some travel art, after all) the canvas bag, a David Hockney reproduction which I'd picked up at the Tate exhibit while in London a few years ago, and which became thereafter my swim bag.  Then I went back to fun with Alexander.


We had a busy afternoon...the swim, then coming home for a snack and rest, then making dinner for Joseph (it was Friday night)...so I didn't think of it again until just before I went to bed.  Unloading the bag, shaking everything out, then shaking out again, I began to panic.  No necklace.

I'm not much of a jewelry person, but this one is always with me, part of me after all this time.  It's the one Jake gave me for our tenth wedding anniversary, three small diamond and gold droplets, graduated in size to represent, he told me (as I stared, astounded), our past, our present and our future together.  It was a gift so unlike anything he would have ordinarily chosen that it became a kind of icon of the moment. 

Jake was, really, a romantic person.  Each holiday, birthday, anniversary brought a huge bouquet of flowers to the door.  Celebrations were often weekend trips or longer journeys, often surprises (we were only a few miles from Williamsburg when I realized where he was taking me one birthday), and tokens picked up along the way to remind us of where we had been. But something like this...I couldn't get my head around his head thinking of this gift.  That day I clipped it on me and there it stayed, all through the next decade and on into widowhood, removed only for showers, MRIs...and of course swims.

The next morning I called the pool, emailed the Farm director, and then, the minute they opened, rushed over to beg the lifeguards to help me look for it in the only two or three places it could have dropped out. They checked lost and found, drawers and cubbies.  Ben, the director, kindly sympathetic, promised to keep an eye out.  All kinds of scenarios were going through my mind, including, I'm sorry to say, the not very generous image of someone finding it and deciding it was their lucky day.  On someone else, I imagined bitterly, it would be bereft of meaning, only a sham.

In a few days, Ben wrote to say a necklace did show up, one with gold stars, but it wasn't mine.  I looked for a photograph to send him, but because I am not a selfie taker, and, frankly, dislike having my picture taken at all, it was difficult to come up with any.  Finally, my sister texted me one she had snapped in front of the Louvre last year (neither the museum nor I come out looking dignified, but at least the necklace shows clearly.  And,no, it won't appear here, though Mary Ellen looks good).

Meanwhile, my mind was undergoing a sea change, not unlike those transformers all the kids had to have a few decades ago.  Though I live only a block from where Jake is buried, I avoided that corner when I walked each morning, shamed by my carelessness.  It occurred to me that this might be some sort of sign.  He's been gone eight years last month, but maybe the universe was trying to point out that life with him had become, as Grace Paley wrote, a known closed book.  My sister, trying to salve my sorrow, reminded me that loss often means an opening to something else.  Like what?  Goodness knows, life has changed almost constantly these past years.  Haven't I changed enough with it?

When a week had gone by, hearing no more news, I briefly thought of filing for insurance, but I didn't dare open that can of psychological worms.   Money, or even a close replacement was useless; it wasn't, after all, so much the jewelry that was precious but that signature of a life.



Interestingly, my reading during the past week has been, first, Jill McCorkle's new book Hieroglyphics, about a couple whose lives were each founded on loss, and for whom such small leavings mean everything.  (The book comes on the heels of her Life after Life; my favorite of all of hers, it also, though in a different context, threads through the same theme.)  When I came to the last page, I reached automatically for one of Anne Tyler's to re-read.  Jill's stories and the telling of them always seem to me to share the same sensibilities as Tyler's, and three novels later, An Accidental Marriage closed beside meI lifted my head, now wrung out with late regret.

About now you may be saying to yourself, perhaps understandably impatient, "Yes, yes, how sad...but we do lose things, after all...one gets over it."  It's how I too kept thinking I should be thinking.

Should have been thinking, should be thinking still.  And yet...our losses return over and over in waves, no matter what the latest event that brings them forth.

I put aside Marriage, and picked up my phone, which, by the way, had been oddly silent the hours I was reading.  On it was a message from the Farm:  "Necklace", Ben had entitled it.  It had been sent an hour before, probably just when I had gotten to the point in the story where Michael, the husband of the couple, finally comes face to face with the now-grown child they had lost track of over 30 years before.  I don't think there is significance in that...only in the message that lay for an hour unreceived while I read it: Good morning.  I think my assistant manager, Seth, found your necklace.  Picture attached.


 "I'm on my way," I wrote back, grabbed my keys and headed to the Farm.

Seth, who, it turned out, was no longer at the pool, but at the grocery while his kids napped, told me the story of the find when we met in the parking lot.  He and his family had been leaving their swim session when his little one dropped the top of her sippy cup just outside the entry gate.  He leaned down to pick it up, and there, half buried in the gravel, he saw my necklace.  Unwilling to leave it at the desk, he put it in his pocket. "I'd been reading the emails about it," he said, "so I knew it was important to you."

I didn't know how to thank him...a nice dinner, I offered?  a gift? anything at all? I kept babbling my thanks over and over.  No, no, he repeated.  "I'm just glad to get it back to you."


In the car, I clicked the necklace on, still a little rough from its week in the gravel, and went shopping myself, every few minutes patting my neck where it lay like a security blanket.  Now, a day later, I seem to be traveling between the way things were before its loss and a different place I haven't figured out yet.  I'm relieved, of course, but what I am swimming in is much more complex than relief.

In the meantime, however, I am pretty sure I owe Seth's little girl something for dropping her sippy cup just where it could turn my day and my sense of where I am around.  Monday, I'll see to it.

And I am thinking that that loss and that find with all their reverberations would play good parts in either of those authors' novels, wouldn't they?

2 comments:

  1. Heartwarming. Faith in the goodness of people. Happiness of a love kept close to our hearts.
    I can't feel what you feel/felt, as the story is yours, but those thoughts come to me.

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    Replies
    1. Yes! "Faith in the goodness of people, and happiness of a love kept close to our hearts." And Trust: the Universe will have your back. Trust. This story: I can't stop smiling!

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