One night this week I was waiting for an uptown local subway train to take me to my destination, a movie theater where I was going to meet my friend, Felipe. I was standing on the platform with fellow members of the beaten-down-after-work-heading-to-the-land-of-gin-and-tonic crowd. Most of the herd was looking in the direction of the dark hole of a tunnel for an oncoming train’s headlights that were nowhere in sight. I was focused on the tracks fixated on this depressing sight.
"Is that what I think it is?"
The curled green cover made me think that this little book, whether it held addresses, notes, or the answers to all of the important secrets of life (where do all my lost socks go?), had probably belonged to a woman. Yet, maybe it belonged to a guy who is colorblind or indifferent to color or simply a fan of green and has a leprechaun fetish. Whoever this notebook belonged to, he or she probably had no idea what happened to it. As pessimistic as I am by nature, I like to think that it was not the owner that tossed this little book into the tracks.
Little green notebook meeting its depressing end.
I imagine its owner probably just thought it disappeared and entered the void, as lost things often seem to do. Then, after realizing our loss we think:
We (thinking): Where the hell did [whatever that is] go?
Through the years I’ve asked that exact question about the aforementioned lost socks, as well as gloves, umbrellas, tickets, lip balm, packs of gum, pens, keys, photographs, my American Express card, and rather fabulously two crisp twenty dollar bills that had the unmitigated gall to sprout wings before my eyes when I stopped to use a pay phone at least 25 years ago. How that happened was I unzipped a fanny pack I was wearing strapped across the front of my body. I dipped my mitt in for change and my wallet-less cash flew out in the summer breeze and sailed gracefully in tandem into the slits in a sewer grate. I looked helplessly down in the grate at them looking up at me at least ten feet out of my grasp forever. My half-deaf ears were in better shape in my reckless youth for I seem to recall hearing them snicker. I vividly remember that sick feeling of loss I suffered as if it happened yesterday. This was also the last time I wore one of those tourist-type nerd packs anywhere on my body ever again. Even though I knew exactly where my cash went, that incident also absconded with one of the many missing pieces of my mind.
My battered Moleskine notebook safe and sound ... for now.
Lame Adventures 