Slipping Up

by Stephanie Black

There’s a good chance that Samuel the Lamanite took a prophetic peek into our household before he warned the Nephites that the day would come when “we lay a tool here, and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle . . . for behold the land is cursed, and all things have become slippery, and we cannot hold them.” Amen, brother. Slippery items in our household include:

TV remotes
Tape
Fingernail clippers
The first-grader’s shoes
The toddler's shoes
Library books
Sanity

I have taken some small steps to outwit the barbarians within my gates. It drives me crazy if I need to back up a file and I can’t find a memory stick, so I keep memory sticks buried in my clothing drawer. I keep the USB cord for my camera in another dresser drawer (the same drawer that holds my Jelly Belly stash). I put tape and glue in a box on a high shelf in my closet. That last one doesn’t stop the vandal hordes, but it does require that the smaller marauders stand on a chair before they can pillage and burn.

Unfortunately, my children aren’t the only ones who lose things. I lost my car on Saturday. This happened to me once before. We were living in Massachusetts and I’d taken my children to a neighboring city to listen to President Hinckley speak in a special regional fireside (my husband was on a business trip). After the fireside, I went where I thought I’d left my car, but I couldn’t find it. So I looked . . . and looked . . . and looked. It was insane. I scoured that parking garage, even checking out floors where I knew I hadn’t parked. The garage emptied out and I was still wandering in the wilderness. I was getting scared—what if our egg-shaped minivan had caught the eye of some family-oriented thief? A nice young family from Vermont took pity on me and gave me a ride around the garage as we searched. With the place about to close down for the night, we consulted a worker who suggested we look in a particular area and lo and behold—my car! It was the oddest thing. I could have sworn I’d searched the whole place a jillion times over, but somehow there was this little area that I’d missed. My Vermont friend and I embraced and she gave me cookies.

This past Saturday was a miniature case of déjà vu. I came out of the mall, headed to where I thought I'd parked my car and—no car. My thirteen-year-old and I did the search thing, where at first you hope nobody notices that you can’t find your car, you're just taking the scenic route around the parking lot, ha ha, but pretty soon you’ve been wandering around so long that it’s impossible to hide that fact that you’re auditioning for the Nincompoop Review. To make matters trickier, I needed to leave immediately to go pick my son up from baseball practice. Still carless after much searching, I started calling friends to see if someone could go pick up my son, but had no success. Fortunately, we did find the car and it was another of those “how the heck did I miss this part of the lot?” moments. I was twenty minutes late to baseball practice, but the coach was extremely nice and told me how he’d once lost his car at an Oakland A’s game. Then my neighbor told me how she lost her car while shopping—she was heading back inside to talk to store security, thinking it had been stolen, when she walked right past it. And my sister lost her Geo once, but she figured it hadn’t been stolen, since, well, it was a Geo. So I did feel better knowing this happens to other people too.

For the record, I do know where my keys are.