Lost and found

I hate clutter. Every now and then I have a tendency to toss out junk in our house that appears to have been abandoned and is devoid of any future potential. My constitution sometimes backfires on me though. The wife, kids, and even the dog don't have any real affection for my "throwing away parties". I'm learning that the formally useless, tossed in the corner, seemingly forgotten, piece of junk of yesterday is now today's treasure but only after the owner has discovered that it was thrown into the scrap heap. I get howls of protest. I get death threats. The worst is "the flying dagger look" which is always administered with deadly silence. Believe me, when you've been the recipient of silent, flying daggers, you in a heap o' trouble, cousin.

And so, yesterday while the wife was doing some ironing (after my sarcastic remark slyly indicating that I would just do it myself), she discovered that some essential accessory to her brand new iron was missing. (This is the very iron that I just bought her with all the bells and whistles. The top of the line one that she has used about twice in the last 8 months. Yup, thats the one). I immediately came under suspicion of foul play. She knows that if anything is missing, I must be blamed. It's automatically my fault. No need for a prosecutor, jury, or judge. Sentence is pronounced and it's always the same: guilty on all charges. Send him straight to the electric chair.

She starts by asking me if I've seen this widget that fills the iron with water. Who me? nope. Never seen it, never heard of it, never used it, etc. Don't even know what it looks like. At that instant she knows I've chucked it. "Did it again didn't you"? "YOU THREW IT OUT"! "My filler bottle"! Oh the agony! She ranted and raved like she had rabies. My ass was grass and she was the lawn mower. Well, I very quickly started attempting to mentally review everything I had eighty-sixed in the hope I would remember this stupid thing. No luck. I couldn't place it. Not that I would reserve much memory for an iron accessory. But it was important to her and we don't want Momma upset cause that ain't too fun. I next asked her if she had looked for it. Of course, everywhere. It's nowhere to be found. She's scoured the house and two surrounding counties and it is gone. And by the way, in case you haven't picked up on this, it's my fault that it's gone. Past experience with the rest of my clan is that if they say they have looked for it, they are only talking about the space from their eyes to the tip of their nose.

She had me believing that I had indeed thrown this thing away. Heck, I figured she was probably right and I was pretty much resigned to my fate of having her give me a good shellacing about it for the rest of the day, if not the rest of the month. She has the female instinct to not forget about injustices done to her and will bring it up years from now, just in case it might come in handy in an argument or a pending decision to go to an expensive restaurant.

With her trailing off into the bedroom, mumbling about the same crime committed against her for the upmteenth time a certain part of my being kicked in and started to gnaw at me.

I really, really, really hate to lose anything.

It drives me crazy. I will look for the rest of my life until I find what has been lost or at least I can verify it's untimely fate. I lost a strut off a model airplane (in flight) years ago and looked for it for hours in a huge field without success. That field is now a Home Depot and I cannot drive past it without looking on at least one side of the road to see if it's there. Nevermind that the plane was sold in 1995, I want my strut back. It's not just my stuff either, it's anybody's. An aquaintance in the model airplane club lost a muffler off his plane in the same field and I helped him look for it for hours. We never did find it. That muffler haunts me to this day and it wasn't even mine.

I thought that maybe there was a chance that I might actually be innocent of the charges levied against me and proceeded to look for it. Like a bloodhound I started sniffing out every nook and cranny in the laundry room. Our's is about as big as yours is; about the size of the average walk-in closet so there aren't many nooks or crannies. I'm not too clear on what a cranny actually is either. One of these days I'm going to have to do a Google search on crannys and see what pops up. Probably get at least one search result from ebay anyway. I guarentee it. The water filler bottle wasn't behind the washer or dryer and that left me with the cabinet under the sink. Upon opening the sink I started to get a suspicious feeling that I was going to hit pay-dirt because I found the owner's manual to the iron right off the bat. A little digging around and there to be found underneath the dog's puppy training pads was what I was positive was the previously lost water bottle thing. I was grinning from ear to ear, holding it up in front of me like a first place ribbon won at the county fair pie eating contest. Oh and it was neat looking too. Real sleek and sporty like something that might come out of an expensive designer catalog. Probably was inspired by something that Georgio Armanni made for some Italian supermodel. I sort of remembered it from when we took the iron out of the box. It wasn't the kind of thing that a guy would use since you can fill an iron by holding it under the faucett. Apparently, females don't do it this way. Note that I didn't make a jab at them and indicate that they weren't technically savvy enough to fill an iron with water. I'll let that snide remark wait for another day.

I strolled out of the laundry room, holding my prize out in front of me just like an olympic torch bearer and proceeded to look for my bride. I also briefly considered the merits of those puppy training pads since "fluffy" hasn't been doing too good in that department lately. Maybe I should just throw them out. I filed my report mentally and concentrated on the business at hand. Changing from my shit eating grin to my best poker face, I walked into the bedroom. There she was with her back to me in the walk in closet, putting away some clothes, most likely still fuming about the loss of her most prized of all tools. When she turned around I held it up in front of her and said, "Here it is, you want your ass eatin' back"?

Cleared of all these false charges, I exited the bedroom, beaming with delight not because I was once again a free man, but because the water filler thing was FOUND.