On the Deplorable Necessity of Finding One's Own Things

I want to begin, as I so often must, by acknowledging that I read the news the way one takes a spoonful of medicine that has been poured, against one's wishes, into a rather nice crystal glass — obligingly, and with visible distaste. Today's spoonful concerns a small plastic disc, on sale at Amazon for the startling, almost insulting sum of twenty-four dollars, whose function is to be attached to one's belongings so that, when those belongings go missing, a telephone may be consulted to locate them.

I have read this sentence perhaps six times now, and each time it curdles a little more.

One does not *lose* things. One simply forgets, momentarily, which member of staff has custody of them. This is not the same. Losing a thing implies a kind of chaos, a rupture in the natural order, whereby an object that ought to be in a known location is instead in an unknown one, and no one — no one at all — is accountable for the discrepancy. Whereas in a properly run household, when father's second boat key cannot be located, one does not fumble about with a telephone application squinting at a little blue dot on a little grey map. One rings Griselda. Griselda has been with us eleven years. Griselda knows where everything is, including, on one memorable occasion, an aunt.

And this is the part I find myself circling back to, again and again, like a moth around one of the smaller chandeliers: the entire *premise* of the tracking disc assumes that a person's possessions are simply out there, unsupervised, drifting through the world without a designated human whose entire professional function is to know where they are at all times. It's not that I think poorly of the twenty-four-dollar disc. I don't think of it at all, really, except in the way one thinks of a raincoat, or a bus timetable — with a sort of anthropological curiosity about the lives of people for whom such things are load-bearing.

Because that is what this is, isn't it — infrastructure. A support beam. For the poors, apparently, the correct response to "I cannot find my keys" is not "one simply asks someone else to have known where the keys were," but rather "one purchases, for real American currency, a tiny surveillance biscuit and affixes it to the keys preemptively, in anticipation of a chaos one has decided, somehow, to simply live inside of." I find this so sad I nearly had to sit down, and I was already sitting down, so I had Nigel bring the ottoman up several inches instead, which is the version of sitting down further available to me.

Do you know what I do when I cannot find something? I do not know. I have never located an object in my life. This is not boastfulness — it is simply a true account of my lived experience, the way another person might say "I have never operated a lawnmower" or "I have never queued." Things appear before me. When they cease to appear before me, other things happen — quietly, upstream, in rooms I am not required to enter — and then the original thing reappears, usually cleaner than before. I could not tell you the mechanism. I imagine it involves several people and possibly a van. What I can tell you is that at no point in this process has a telephone ever needed to know where anything was, because the telephone is for calling father, and occasionally for looking at pictures of islands I am considering.

And yet here is Amazon — a company I understand does something with boxes — proudly announcing that its little tracking disc has reached its lowest price *ever*, as though this were a triumph, as though twenty-four dollars were some sort of victory lap rather than a fairly clear signal that an enormous number of people are, on a daily basis, actively unable to locate their own wallets. One imagines the scene: a person, presumably employed, presumably capable of tying their own shoes, patting down the sofa cushions of their home in a rising panic because a small plastic rectangle containing their whole financial identity has slipped, unaccompanied, into the crevice between two throw pillows, with no one — no Griselda, no Nigel, no one at all — positioned to have simply *known*. It's not merely inconvenient. It's structurally unsound. It's a household with no scaffolding, held up by nothing but hope and, now, apparently, Bluetooth.

One does wonder what it must be like, this business of "keeping track" of one's own possessions as a *personal responsibility*, rather than an ambient condition of the universe that simply resolves itself around you, the way weather does, or traffic. I'm told — and I confess I find this genuinely difficult to picture, the way I find it difficult to picture the inside of a washing machine mid-cycle — that some people go their whole lives retracing their own steps. Physically. On foot. Walking backward through a day trying to remember where they last had a thing, as though the day were a corridor and the thing were hiding in it, playing some grim, unpaid game of hide and seek with a person who has nowhere else they'd rather be looking. It sounds exhausting. It sounds, frankly, like a job — one more of the many, many jobs poors seem to accumulate without ever being offered the alternative, which is, and I cannot stress this enough, simply not having the problem in the first place.

I don't say any of this with cruelty. I want that understood, because I know how it can read, and I would so hate to be misunderstood on a matter this dear to me. I am not looking down at anyone specific — I don't know these people, these Amazon customers, these twenty-four-dollar disc enthusiasts, and I am sure many of them are perfectly nice in the way that people who do their own laundry are often perfectly nice, in a scrappy, self-sufficient sort of way I find almost sweet. It's the *condition* that troubles me — the vast, hovering fact of a world in which "I might misplace something and have no one whose job it is to notice" is treated as an unremarkable baseline of adult life, rather than the emergency it plainly is. One wants to reach through the screen and say: darling, you don't need a tracking disc. You need a household. Ring father. He'll sort the household. He sorted mine, and I have never once had to think about a set of keys in my adult life, except to hand them to someone.

The trouble, of course, is that not everyone has a father positioned to sort a household, which I understand, intellectually, the way I understand that not everyone has a summer place — as a fact I have been told is true, filed alongside other facts I have been told are true, like the existence of Belgium. I don't doubt it. I simply cannot make it *make sense*, viscerally, as a lived condition, any more than I can make sense of queueing, or of the word "commute," which I am given to understand is a sort of forced, repeated errand people perform simply to arrive at a job, which is itself an errand they've agreed to perform in exchange for the money required to solve the very problems that, in my experience, evaporate on their own.

So: a plastic disc, twenty-four dollars, the lowest it's ever been. A record low. A milestone. I suppose there is something almost touching in that — an entire industry organizing itself, quarter after quarter, around the tender, universal hope that if only the disc were a little cheaper, one might finally stop losing things, rather than the far simpler and, to me, rather more obvious remedy, which is staff.

One simply asks father, you know?

— Cynthia