Lost and found

Yeah, I have a tendency to lose stuff. A lot of times, it's not forever -- for example, my apartment complex guest parking pass took a two-month vacation in the recesses of my gym bag. I shelled out $50 to my management office to get another one, only to find the original a few days later. Of course. Right now I'm missing a black leather belt (haven't seen it since Christmas) and I would love to know what happened my favorite weekend and travel bra, the most comfortable on earth. (It was dark blue, wireless, very soft. Anyone seen it?)

But beyond my own carelessness, I really wonder about the things other people lose. I mean, you hear stories all the time about stuff left behind on subways and in cabs -- and not just cell phones and umbrellas. Wigs, false teeth, prosthetic limbs, wedding gowns.

But what about stuff that seems almost intentionally left behind? On the side of the entrance ramp from Rte. 123 to I-66 eastbound, there is a pair of black shoes, the kind restaurant servers wear, neatly placed side by side. They didn't just fall out of someone's car. They look just like you'd see them in someone's closet. So someone must've left them there on purpose. But why? Since I drive that way almost every day, I've seen them sitting there for almost a month, both pointed northeast, as if they're pondering their next step.

At work, there is a car in the parking garage that has been there since at least last summer, in the exact same spot. It's next to the place where I often park. It's a pretty nice car -- late model VW Jetta, no more than five or six years old, I would guess. It has Illinois plates and I haven't noticed if they're expired. Inside, you can see the owner's work ID (though it's concealed enough not to reveal the person's actual identity). There are also a number of nice button-down men's shirts hanging in the back seat.

At first, I thought it belonged to someone on a long-term assignment. Now I realize it's probably a permanent fixture, at least until security gets wise and tows it away. It has become so dusty that I've been tempted to write "drive me" on the rear window. But how do you just "forget" about a car? Even if the owner didn't want it anymore, it would be much more fiscally sound to, say, donate it to charity for the tax write-off. Didn't the owner at least want the shirts? I feel sorry for that car. It didn't realize when it was pulling into the garage on that fateful day that it had just taken its last trip. Maybe the owner hit the lottery and left work in a taxi that day, headed for the airport and never looking back.

Sometimes you can lose things and know exactly where they are. When my ex-boyfriend and I broke up, we had a lot of clothes at each other's residences. Since he lives in Florida and me here around DC, and we haven't spoken in almost two years, planning a return-my-stuff rendezvous isn't exactly easy. The only thing I really miss from that is a baby tee I picked up at a Black Crowes concert. I find myself in a great moral struggle about what to do with his stuff. At first it was emotional attachment, but now it's just because I don't feel like I have a right to get rid of it -- it's really not mine, even though I'm just dying to drop it all off at the Salvation Army.

I've theorized that it would be awesome if one day you could get back every possession that ever belonged to you, just to pick through it and decide if you had made any bad judgments in tossing something by the wayside. Sure, you'd end up with a lot of crap that you didn't want for good reason, but you might come across some hidden gem that you could really use. It's probably not all that surprising, then, that I have to fight pack rat-ish tendencies. My grandmother is the absolute beacon of that and I hold her up as an example of how not to become. My grandfather died 11 years ago. She hasn't gotten rid of a single thing that belonged to him, nor much of anything else that's come into her clutches. Ever.

So maybe, then, losing things from time to time is good. If nothing, it teaches us how to say good-bye. And there's always that old saying about loving something and setting it free. So I guess that parking pass was really meant to be. Let's see if my belt and bra feel the same way.