random thoughts – Day 1,561 – (Wednesday) – lost and found

The ride to work had a couple hiccups. The first involved me remembering there were earrings in my wallet and thinking it was a good idea to try and put them in while siting at a red light and at the same time thinking it could go badly. Yes, I often hold conflicting ideas. One earring went in easily. The light changed before I got the second one in, but the back was reattached to the post and I proceeded straight through the intersection and down Lakeview, earring held between my thumb and forefinger while holding the steering wheel.

All of a sudden, a silver SUV came lurching out of a side street to my left and nearly hit the front quarter of my car. The brakes were hit and the work bag flew off the seat and spilled business cards, pens, folders, and all sorts of stuff onto the passenger side floor. The adrenaline rushed. The aggravation of a 2009 traffic accident that had my car in a shop for what felt like forever flashed through my memory. The earring was dropped when I leaned on the horn for a long blast. There were some colorful sentence enhancers uttered at and about the idiot driver and also a tiny voice in my head saying "I told you so. Not half a block away, remember?"

Once I parked on the fourth level of the parking garage, a search for the earring began, using the flashlight on the phone and detective skills acquired though an adolescent love of mystery novels and  years of adult indulgences in TV detective shows. The seats and floor mats and under the floor mats were checked, along with the space between the front seats and the tracks that the seats move along. Two pennies were found, plus all the dirt the car vacuum can’t ever reach, but no peridot post earring in a gold setting.

There were donuts in the office today, which was a win. It was also our quarterly team lunch day, with lunch ordered in from a downtown deli. That was another win. The rest of the day was ok. Productive. Sane. I didn't lose anything else. 

Worthen House, the oldest bar in Lowell.

There was a quick walk the block to historic City Hall with its clock tower to drop off the annual street census for voting precincts at the Election Commission. The route back was deliberately more circuitous, purely to enjoy the beautiful weather and visit previously found landmarks. A turn down Worthen Street took me past the Worthen House (oldest bar in Lowell) where local citizens (including Jack Kerouac) have socialized since 1898. 

The garden at
Whistler House Museum.

Spitting distance from the Worthen (no, I don't actually spit) is the birthplace of James MacNeill Whistler, now the Whistler House Museum of Art. The parklike courtyard garden, presided over by a  statue of Whistler, is always pretty. 

After work, at home, the car search continued with no luck. The theories are whirling in my head. Maybe it was in my lap and fell to the ground in the parking garage and landed under the car. I forgot to check the area around and under the car and didn’t even think of it until I was heading down the exit ramp to the first floor, with the exit in sight. 

The earring may be gone for good, sucked into some small Jeep black hole from which it may never return. It looks like The BungaLowell chapter of Earrings without Partners has another member, and the mental file of things I will fret over when I really want to be sleeping has a new entry for the ever-expanding mental slide deck. But it was still a pretty good day.