Don’t you hate losing stuff? Boy, I do. It’s just an awful feeling. For example, I’ve lost track of the fact that this subject is redundant. Didn’t I just do a bit on lost stuff?

Anyway, I found my watch. I have a nice one – a Citizen Eco-Drive – for days when I don’t plan to play rough or get dirty. But the one that disappeared was this old Casio.

I bought it eight or ten years ago at Big Five sporting goods in Santa Barbara. The list price was $60, but I got it for $20 on sale. Pretty good deal, huh? It’s been ticking or pulsing or whatever they do for a long time, and it runs perfect. Has a stopwatch, and it’ll store names and phone numbers. Which proves I got it in the days before we kept that data in our phones.

While I was looking for it, I thought that maybe one of the people who’ve come to visit me recently made off with my watch. (Just a ridiculous but inevitable misfiring of neurons.) And I thought about the things – some precious and valuable, some cheap but useful – that make up our little lives. And how, if you’re like me, you’re in no particular rush to replace them, just because they get old and scratched and ugly.

I still have the phone that my parents gave me for my 17th birthday, in 1978. Still have the same number too, which ends in the digits 17 to commemorate the day.

Back in them days, we didn’t need dials or buttons. We just picked it up and said, “Operator, get me ….” OK, that’s not true, and that’s not really the phone. But I really still have it, and compared with today’s digital cell phones my old desk phone is more like that antique than you’d imagine.

The watch was found stuffed in the pocket of a pair of sweats in the closet. The last place I looked, as usual. … And don’t you think I could get a job writing for Andy Rooney?