If You Want to Find Something, Look for Something Else

By Al Batt

I had decided what I was going to wear for Halloween.

My costume will be a gas pump.

That will throw a scare into anybody who provides profits for the petroleum industry.

The truth is that I haven’t gone as anything other than myself at Halloween in eons. I figure I’m frightening enough.

Not having to decide on a costume left me with time to do something I’d been fixing to do. I needed to put up a manual release cord for the garage door opener. I had the item. I’d had it since the first Bush administration.

One of my family’s mottos is the commonsensical, “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”

I knew I’d get around to installing that cord one day, so I’d put it in a place so good, I’d always remember where it was.

You’ve seen this movie before.

I looked in all the places where I thought it might be, which meant I looked in all the places where it wasn’t.

I can’t help it. It’s genetic. My parents put things away in good places. Many of those things were never seen again.

I played a solo game of hide-and-seek until I threatened to hold my breath until that cord showed itself. We’re all bad at things, and we’re all good at things. I’m good at putting things away in good places. I’m bad at finding the things I put away in good places, but I refused to surrender to the tidal wave of frustration.

I might have whimpered, “I wouldn’t know my butt from a phone book, if we still had a phone book.”

But I have experience on my team. When I can’t remember something, I think about something else or look for something else. When I can’t remember a name, I occupy my mind with something else, and that name comes galloping.

Because it’s sweater weather, I decided to think about the upcoming static electricity season. Ben Franklin proved lightning was a form of natural electricity, but only after he discovered that a sweater-wearing kite produced static electricity.

The ancients cooked with static electricity shocks until they were able to figure out the whole fire thing.

Today, a doorknob becomes an electric chair after dry air creates a game of electric tag. I lose electrons as I walk across the carpet, and that friction results in a positive electrical charge. Then when I touch metal or another living being, I receive a mild shock — just mild enough to operate a data center for two years.

I prepare for the cold, dry weather that introduces the static electricity shock season by hoping to become ex-static while shopping for a sweater and trying to get one free of charge. Never take a sweater filled with static electricity to school for show and tell. I’m just saying.

ZAP! Whenever electrons jumped from my finger to someone’s ear to balance an electrical difference, I’d say “Circuit City!”

Circuit City and Best Buy had battled for the top spot as a retail electronics store. “This here town ain’t big enough for both of us,” spokespersons for both companies said.

Best Buy won by a TKO. I’m sure that came as an electrical shock to Circuit City.

My plan worked. Thoughts of static electricity caused me to come to the realization that I should ask my wife where it was. She knew. Part of being married is that you help one another find things. I misplace them. She finds them. She couldn’t find them without me. We’re a team.

I watched a black-capped chickadee busily caching seeds in my yard. This tiny bird remembers the location of thousands of cached seeds. The chickadee’s hippocampus grows each fall to support the bird’s incredible memory.

I wish mine could do that. Happy, happy, hippo.

It doesn’t work in a human birdbrain.

I should keep a good places book; a little black book that showed where I’d put things. But where would I keep that little black book of good places to put things? In a good place so I’d always remember where it was, of course.

I’d still need to ask my wife where that good place was.