April 27, 1979 (14 years old): Dear diary…My whole sticker collection is gone. It fell off my desk into the trashcan and I never noticed. I’ve been collecting stickers for 5 years and they’re all gone. God, it hurts when you lose something like that. Now I have to start over again.
HAHAHAHA!
Do you remember forever the things you lose? I had forgotten about those stickers until poking around in one of my old scrapbook/journals this evening, but there are other items I have lost, sold, misplaced or loaned with no return that I still remember and wish I had back.
- The blue notebook full of drawings that Becky and I did in 7th grade
- There Might Have Been Castles in paperback, but I can’t remember now who borrowed it. It was a bad, bad book, I don’t know why it stuck in my mind. That book is the reason I now write down my books that are out on loan with the borrower’s name and date (also thus fulfilling my secret desire to be a librarian).
- The handblown coiled gray glass snake I bought in Venice during a choir trip in high school that broke during a careless vacuuming session years later.
- The little book that I wrote and illustrated for a 5th grade class assignment that Mrs Brown never gave back to me. I don’t remember a thing about the plot or the drawings, but I remember being inordinately proud of it, and that the protagonists were a cat and an eagle.
- My first oil painting of an autumn tree, done when I was 12 or 13 as a Christmas gift for my grandmother. After her death, while cleaning out her house, I took it back and that evening it was stolen out of my car in Chicago, along with a set of matching seagreen placemats and cloth napkins (wtf?)
- The card table from my grandmother’s house that was in our storage unit, stupidly abandoned when we moved to Sweden.
- My favorite stuffed animal, a yellow, white and brown reclining rabbit, that I accidentally left out overnight in the rain when I was a child. It never recovered from its drenching, getting moldy, and had to be thrown away.
- The entire Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew collections I had as a kid until I stupidly decided around the age of 16 that I was too old for them.
It seems ridiculous that these particular material goods have somehow caught fast with little barbed hooks in my memory. I can’t seem to shake them loose. I suspect that when I’m 97 and drooling in my wheelchair, I’ll be heard mumbling about that bitch Mrs Brown never returning my masterpiece.
What have you lost that you wish you could recover?