The chronicles of the lost shoe and secret world of magic
Beside the glass door of the J.B. O’Keefe Centre lies a plain old box. Nothing out of the ordinary, just old and simple. I never noticed it until its particular smell reached me.
That simple old box was the lost and found. One of them, since there are two across campus.
This one is deemed for sneakers only. Filled to the brim with old rubber sneakers, old, hardly white laces, broken leather loafers. All giving off an odour that is almost a presence.
I stood there trying to underst
and something that seemed simple, even common knowledge. How does a person leave her shoes behind, walk home and not feel it?
Perhaps the body noticed and the mind, tired, said, “it’s fine. I know that voice. I have used it on things much larger than shoes” and carried on her merry way.
The second lost and found, that carries everything else, lives at the help desk in James Dunn Hall where keys, wallets and cards are kept with some dignity.
I wanted to know more. I needed to know if the girl with no shoes got to her destination. Question after question, story after story.
A lost ring found on Tuesday, placed in the lost and found on Wednesday, found by its owner by Friday.
Why couldn't everything be that simple?
I asked around. All I got back were blank stares and more questions than I had before I started.
Students didn’t even know we had a lost and found. Perhaps it's too niche. Another looked at me as though I had asked about a secret door that travelled to a magical world full of fairies and mermaids.
The staff that I poked with questions tried, but still, to no avail, knew the answer. The boxes, tall with the lost items of so many people, could be lost for weeks, months and even years. No one was sure, it wasn't theirs, it was “lost and found.”
No one seemed to understand that a lost “thing” is a small interrupted life. Someone was in a hurry, or sad, or thinking of something else and let go of an object without knowing it was the last time it would feel its touch.
The person went on. The object remained still. Transformed from owned to lost without a single blink of an eye. I think about what remains in me. The things I left somewhere, in someone, in the years of growing up and never went back for not by a predisposed decision. But by that soft, ordinary, kind way of forgetting.
It’s only when it starts to smell and annoys me that I make the effort to go and check.
Perhaps it all runs on hope.
Hope that the owner will remember. Will know exactly where to look. Will instantly grab what it was theirs before the label of “lost” will be instilled.
But Hope is tender and fleeting. It is not a storage plan.
And winter is coming. Somewhere on this campus a student is cold and somewhere in a box a coat is waiting for no one. In my aim for answers, I found a toy car.
Scratched, worn, nameless. As I stood there, staring at the toy car, I built it’s life in my head.
A small little boy, racing his car in the ultimate race, interrupted by parents in a rush to get home, a shove and a fall from a coat pocket. The car was disqualified from the race and left behind. Nobody knew whose it was. I put it back with the left hoodies, water bottles and smelly old socks.
But something in me had moved. I had wanted so badly for that car to win. For that car to be found. But maybe that is what a lost object is: a treasure for all those that have the eye to see and give it meaning.
As I left, I imagined that little boy looked in his pocket while his parents drove home and found it empty, didn't panic or cry but imagined another child finding it and putting it back into the race.
And of course, it wins.
Sometimes our imagination is the best place to be, a small and cozy box. And maybe that is the purpose of a lost and found. Knowing that nothing is ever truly lost.
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