Seek and ye shall find

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

lost and found
by Jeneen R. Garcia
published in November 2003

In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found, I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :) This first one is especially close to my heart, and explains everything.



Only the Lost & Found section would greet me every morning just outside the Guidance Office as I rushed through the empty halls, as always, late for class.

Nobody could miss it. It was a wooden cabinet with glass doors, and it never lacked for uniforms, lunch boxes, wallets and handkerchiefs—a testament to the honesty (and carelessness) of the good Catholic boys and girls in my grade school.

Most claimants were regulars: the scruffy little boys who did nothing but play and forget their homework. Losing something always seemed to come with the label “irresponsible”.

As a generally good girl, I never dreamed I would get one of my own stuck in that cabinet. But as my Grade 4 teacher often said, “There is always a first time.”

It was probably a notebook, just before the dreaded exams, or my favorite pencil case with the pink rabbit stitched in front. Terribly vital stuff in my young life. Whatever it may have been, it was embarrassing to have to claim it in front of all the passersby, but the relief from recovering my possessions more than made up for it.

Losing important stuff can be disorienting, to say the least. Worse if you don’t realize till much later that you’ve lost something—then you don’t even know where to start looking.

Lost & Found was a comforting limbo for lost things, a visible Bermuda Triangle you could always retrieve your treasures from. It was Hope in the flesh, right there, a wooden cabinet full of objects just waiting to be missed.

Ironically, the older I’ve become, the more I seem to lose. Maybe because I own more stuff now. I’ve lost count of all the books, socks, CDs and pearl earrings I’ve lost, either to unscrupulous borrowers or to Mysterious Circumstances. Or maybe age has made me forget where I keep things—a younger me hiding them in a box for safety, and eventually losing them to dust and a bad memory.

If only the world had one big Lost & Found section, where people could easily get back what they once didn’t take care to keep close.

Twelve years since grade school and I’m still peering through the glass doors of my mind, seeking places, persons, moments I’ve let slip, pieces of myself that I’ve lost in the business of living. Some of them I’ve reclaimed—friends I haven’t heard from in years who suddenly reappear in my Inbox, the smell of freshly baked bread on a summer afternoon—but most are still in shadowy corners, hidden from my sight.

But as all Lost & Found sections promise, seek and ye shall find. I am bound by this promise to search for the precious things I’ve carelessly lost. And finding them, take them out from behind the glass, and this time, take great care to keep them closer to my heart.