Lost and Found and Given Back

Remember the last time you lost something? Lost your keys? Lost a sock? Lost your dog? Lost a footrace? Seems like a strange question. And it is. Because we (at least I) don't remember loosing things. We only notice that they're gone. I spent a whole year in high school trying to figure out what happened to my favorite pair of jeans. It was only after I realized I hadn't seen them in at least three weeks that I started to recognize their absence. And they really were gone. How does one lose a pair of pants? To this day I'm still flabbergasted by the disappearance, even 10 years later. And oddly, that is not the first, nor the last pair of pants I've lost.

This past Friday after a particularly reaming physics exam, I stayed in the room filling out a form for class registration until long after everyone else had left. On my way out I found a notebook and a TI-83 Plus graphing calculator, separately under different desks on different sides of the room.


They were just lying forlorn upon the floor underneath the desk of some carefree student who couldn't be inconvenienced with picking up their scholastic servants, whose services had been employed just minutes earlier in the good name of higher education. I waiting until the next class started to enter the room before removing the notebook, calculator, and myself. I wanted to see if the owners would come back, panicked and worried. They would scoop up their lost items, tell them it would all be okay, that they had never meant to leave them behind. They would make up some lame excuse like, "you know it's Friday and I had to get right home after class to start getting hammered" or, "I totally thought that I had put you away, but you must have fallen out of my backpack!" And that's the way isn't it. Always blame the victim. But alas, no one showed. I thought it proper to rescue these downed soldiers, forgotten by their commanders and left to be scooped up by the enemy. Tortured for their valuable information and cast aside like so many others.

I've resolved, however, to do my best to return them to their rightful owners, though no contact information was available for either. Maybe years ago my pants ended up in the hands of a good samaritan who would have returned them had only I written my contact information on the inside. So I'm going to go write my name in all of my pants. I recommend you do the same.