Tell Someone

People are mostly mystified. I know I am. Last night at 9 when I walked into my house I know had my I-Pod because I had been listening to it for the past two hours as I drove the two hours home. But 20 minutes later it had ceased to exist, was gone, lost, vanished. Today I have looked under every piece of furniture and in all the wastebaskets to no avail.I was also mystified to find that I had exited my own vacation: I drove those 200 miles in 24 hours to see a doctor whose appointment I could have easily postponed and bring food to Uncle Ed who, I seem to have convinced myself, will die entirely without my ceaseless attentions. I think I also drove all the way home  because Dave was driving home for a can't-miss business thing and I feared I might take on some insane project like refinishing my car in his absence.So I exited my vacation at 6pm one day and got back at 9pm the next day. Dave meanwhile, left the lake here 12 hours after me, got back four hours before me and was contentedly watching the Red Sox-Blue Jays game when I walked in with a world of groceries, four kinds of cleaning supplies and two fancy bras I apparently  didn’t think I could get through the week without. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about the missing I-Pod and how I had to listen to the radio the whole way up, bouncing among six or eight stations wobbling in and out of range.I did catch enough on one station to learn that the good people at Kent State  who have just buried a time capsule to be opened 50 years from now are all pretty sure they also buried one 50 years ago now, though nobody can quite remember where.See? They're mystified too - which supports my theory that we should tell everybody everything lest all knowledge be lost. Every one of my kids knows the whole story of our family. They know where all the coolest old letters are filed. They know what spinster Aunt Mame said every time she read about yet another engagement in the paper even though she was born just 14 months after the death of Lincoln. They know where sits the little wooden trunk packed by their four-greats-grandfather as he fled starvation in Ireland in the 1840s.They know all these things and are holding them for me even as I held them for my sorrowing single-parent mom and she held them for her sorrowing widowed dad. I can't tell you how cheerful this makes me feel. In fact maybe I'll call them all now. I'll bet one of them can  just picture what I did with that I-Pod.