A typical day in Lost Angeles
My wife lost her glasses again.
She said, “I had them right here! Right in front of me!”
I looked up from the Outside magazine I was reading and said, “Retrace your steps.”
“Retrace my steps to where? I’ve been sitting here.” She patted the chair. “Right here. My steps have nothing to do with it.”
Outside magazine is filled with people doing things I only dream of doing. Like clinging with one chalky finger to a crack in a sheer rock wall, or riding a wave that is taller than City Hall, or reaching the North Pole on a skateboard.
Man, I think to myself, if I were only younger or stronger or braver or --
“Yoo-hoo! You’re not paying attention to me, Elmer. You’re doing a Walter Mitty trip into the strange unknown.”
“Retrace your steps,” I said again.
“Would you stop with the retracing-your-steps business? I’m looking for my glasses. I can’t believe they’re gone. It’s Aunt Margaret again.”
Margaret was her great aunt, a stern, God-lovin’ woman whose unforgiving, sepia-toned-face glares out at us from an oval frame in a corner. We believe that she’s haunting us and is responsible for lost articles.
I lose socks. They vanish into thin air and reappear months later where they were supposed to be in the first place. I once owned a pair of red socks. Don’t ask “Why red?” They were just red, that’s all.
Anyhow, one of them suddenly disappeared. I had it in my hand, turned to gaze out a window at a passing cloud, and when I turned back, the sock was gone. I retraced my steps from one end of the bed to the other, where I was folding my clean clothes, but it was nowhere in sight. It had slipped into a parallel universe.
I searched for that bloody sock for six months, in every drawer and cabinet in the house, including the top-secret cabinet in which I keep my more expensive booze. I hung the remaining red sock from the ceiling of my writing room to remind me of its missing mate, but then finally I said to hell with it and threw it away. Two days later, I found the lost sock in my sock drawer. Go figure.
I had a friend named Del Lane who theorized that there was a dimension into which certain items vanished for various mystical reasons. He thought of it as a kind of Bermuda Triangle for socks, glasses, important warranties and half-filled bottles of his favorite vodka. He died last year and is probably somewhere at this very moment thinking that he has lost his body and is looking for it everywhere.
“Could I have left my glasses in a salt shaker or maybe in the cat’s ear?”
“Probably, dear.”
“Come on, Elmer, return to Earth! I helped search for your compass last week, even though it seemed odd buying a compass to keep from getting lost and then losing it. Now it’s your turn.”
“It was spooky, not odd. Like lost socks. Maybe things have the ability to shape-shift and become wolves with pale yellow eyes or anacondas that look like Jon Voight.”
She sighed and said, “Just pull away from the high-adventure magazine for a moment to help me look for my glasses. You’re never going to climb Everest anyway. I can’t even get you to walk up the north face of the driveway to throw out the garbage.”
The day that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered Everest, I was dreaming that I was on the mountain in a blizzard, pushing toward the peak, when I suddenly realized that I wasn’t wearing shoes. As I jumped up and down to keep my bare feet out of the snow, it occurred to me that the reason I wasn’t wearing shoes was because I had lost one of my sneakers and, in searching for it, forgot to put on any shoes at all. I awoke with my hair damp with sweat and my feet freezing.
“OK,” I said, “I’ll retrace your steps. What time did you get up this morning?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“You start from Square One. Then you proceed to the next logical location, as men have been doing for centuries, seeking the lost articles of their sobbing women.”
“Right. I can see you sniffing through the woods primeval like some kind of ancient bloodhound, then pointing your nose at a tar pit where my glasses are located.”
“Bloodhounds don’t point. They just sniff. Let me sniff your eyes to get a scent of your glasses, then off I’ll go.”
“Stop smelling me and just look around the living room.”
I went through some old magazines, looked under the sleeping dog (much to his annoyance), peered behind a chair, lifted a couch cushion and -- voila! -- there they were.
“Oh, Elmer,” she said. “You’re my hero!”
And I descended Everest, still barefoot, and strode off with a swagger and a smile, to the cheers of the adoring multitudes, king of the mountain.
*
Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.
