For a while I was afraid to tell anyone, for fear that if I said aloud what was troubling me I would cause it to be true. Better keep quiet, I thought. Maybe I was imagining things. It started with my shoes. They kept moving. I’d kick them off in the front hall, go about my business in the house and suddenly come upon them in the kitchen. Had I put them on, stepped into the kitchen, taken them off again, and forgotten about it? Had they walked there themselves?
You can see why a person might worry. It’s bad enough to have a “senior moment.” It’s far worse when physical objects begin to drift out of your conscious control.
It wasn’t just shoes. My laptop never seemed to be in the same place twice. One morning I sat down to powder my nose, and discovered that my compact had vanished. I hadn’t touched it since the previous morning. Hunting around in my memory, I drew blanks. I had recently put the thing into an evening bag, but I could have sworn that I’d returned it to its customary spot. For heaven’s sake, I’d used it yesterday … hadn’t I?
Unpowdered and uneasy, I went downstairs. (Phew, there were my shoes, where I’d left them. I hadn’t gone completely bonkers yet.)
“Has anyone seen my compact?” I asked my family. “It has disappeared from the bathroom.”
The children shook their heads.
“That’s weird,” I said. In the 1944 movie “Gaslight,” a man tries to convince his wife that she’s going insane by secretly moving objects around. I looked at my husband narrowly.
“You didn’t take it … did you?”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. Which is exactly what the “Gaslight” man would have said.
“Well, no big deal,” I lied. “Let’s get going. Children, to the car!”
The children hefted their backpacks and filed out the front door. My husband went upstairs to shower. I refilled my coffee cup, as usual, slid my phone into my handbag, as usual, slung the bag over my shoulder, and reached for my keys. Huh. Probably they were inside the handbag. Nope.
Cold fear rolled over me. Now my keys were missing. Yet I knew I’d put them there!
After the shoes, the compact, the laptop and the keys, my composure fimally left me. My eyes rolled like a panicking donkey, and I brayed like one, too. I began galloping though the house looking wildly around for my keys: “My keys! My keys! My keys!” Hee-haw!
The sound of all that bucking and braying must have reached the car outside, because soon a quiet voice said: “Are you looking for your keys?”
Wiping my foaming mouth, I nodded.
“Here they are,” said the sweet child. She unzipped a never-once-used exterior pocket of my handbag.
“I put them here so you wouldn’t lose them.”
Epilogue: The second mystery was solved when the 5-year-old remarked that it had “been fun at the spa.” It turned out that she and a friend had played Beauty Parlor. They had put the compact back, honest they had, but in a very different place. The migrating laptop? That was the 14-year-old, using stealth. As for the shoes, that riddle was finally answered when I heard a pair of my own high heels walking toward me, and turned to see a 10-year-old wearing them. My husband, it seems, is innocent.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@ washingtonexaminer.com.
