Things I Have Lost That No Amount of Google Searching Can Recover

Let's call it literary crowdsourcing

A few days ago, my daughter lost a necklace that was important to her. It wasn’t expensive, but it had great sentimental value, and when you are seven you don’t think about things like that; you just roll it up in a towel after swim practice and YOLO it down to the parking lot with your friends. As soon as she burst in the front door in floods of tears, wailing that she’d lost her favorite necklace, I drove her right back to the pool and we spent 45 minutes scouring every conceivable flight path it could have taken after it was launched out of that rolled-up towel, while I simultaneously dispensed soothing “it’s okay, it’s only stuff”-type platitudes and also reassured every person who stopped to ask if I was shuffling around the parking lot in a half-crouch because I had lost a contact that I had not, in fact, lost a contact. Alas, we came up empty-handed.

Whenever I lose something (I lose so many things!), my brain automatically recites one of my favorite poems, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. Am I gonna lose a whole bunch of subscribers if I post it in its entirety? Whatever, this is a poetry Substack now!

[Truly, I love a meme generator!]

Okay fine, I won’t post the poem, but here is a link to it if you would like to read it and don’t have it tattooed across your hippocampus like I do. On further reflection, I can admit that reciting it out loud to a second grader mourning the loss of one of their favorite possessions doesn’t really hit the way you’d hope it would in terms of offering comfort, but I tried. Lesson learned: breaking into the stash of Easter candy is far more effective.

Either way, I love poetry and often treat it the way other people treat, say, meditation or Xanax: it soothes me, both the beauty of the language and structure, but also the familiarity of lines I’ve been reading since I was a teenager. Wouldn’t it be amazing now, in the midst of adulthood, to go back and study literature (or anything, really) the way we studied it at school and in college? (Wait, am I just describing grad school?) Damn, I would love that. To think, I used to spend whole gorgeous, cerebral days—whole gorgeous, cerebral weeks!—just writing and researching an essay on the themes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and now my daily to-do list consists of things like “measure for blinds” and “look for protein shake at Costco” and “call orthodontist back.” Youth is wasted on the young! Deep examination of time and mortality in the works of Philip Larkin is wasted on people who aren’t even old enough to book a rental car! Etcetera.

Anyway, this is all a massive preamble to three things that I have lost, seemingly permanently, that I ostensibly should be able to get back—two of them, for sure, are somewhere on the internet—and yet somehow can’t. They are all pieces of writing, which is arguably the saddest thing to lose (unless, of course, you are a seven-year-old girl and then it’s your favorite necklace), and the fact that I can’t find any of them, and yet think of them all frequently, is like a permanent itch I can’t scratch. I have tried googling, of course, using every keyword I can think of, but I still keep coming up empty. This is a long shot, but do any of these ring a bell?

A poem called “Lacuna”

Starting with the most esoteric, since we’re already on the topic of poetry, but in 1997, I cut a poem called “Lacuna” out of a newspaper in England, probably The Times or The Guardian, and stuck it on the wall of my boarding school dorm alongside the many ads I’d ripped out of magazines for Davidoff Cool Water (lol) and CK One.

[I can literally smell this right now]

I seem to remember the poem was about the recent death of Princess Diana, although I was seventeen at the time, so for me it was about the boy I had a huge crush on. (Who is now my husband! Double lol!) Either way, the physical cutting is now decades-gone, but I still think about this poem sometimes. The poet was a man, but that — and the title, which taught me one of my favorite words — is literally all I can remember. And I want to read it again! I swear I won’t quote it unbidden at seven-year-olds who just want to watch Bluey with a bag of Cadbury mini eggs!

A non-fiction piece about a woman who had asthma as a child and moved around a lot

Okay, this was definitely in The Guardian, sometime around 2004 or 2005. The writer, who I want to say was maybe called Amanda (or Emily? Or possibly Rachel? Or am I just saying women’s names at random now?), wrote the most exquisite piece about moving around a lot as a child, and also about her asthma; the two tied together but I can’t even remember why. She was English but had lived in America, or maybe she was American but had lived in England, and the piece spoke to me in about a hundred different ways. I printed it out on my office printer, and carried it around with me through several moves, and then one day it vanished. All I can really remember is that she told the story of how a friend’s father bought a house because it had an empty field behind it that reminded him of the line in “America” by Simon & Garfunkel: “…and the moon rose over an open field.” Sadly, when I google that and “asthma,” I get a scholarly article entitled “Hydrogen-Induced Disruption of the Airway Mucus Barrier Enhances Nebulized RNA Delivery to Reverse Pulmonary Fibrosis,” which, while I’m sure is scintillating in its own right, is not what I’m after. Is there a 1% chance anyone recalls what I’m talking about?! I want to read this beautiful piece of prose again, plus anything else that Amanda/Emily/Rachel has written since!

Okay, wait, this post actually has something of a happy ending!

When I first started writing this, I had a list of three things I desperately wanted to find, but somewhere during the procrastination process, I actually found the third one, which is both very exciting and narratively sort of annoying, because three things make a list but two things do not!

This particular piece was a short story I had read in McSweeney’s in early 2013, when I was pregnant with my first child, about a mother confronting the fact of her son getting older, and I remember it moving me to tears then, so I was gratified to find that it still moves me to tears now! That child, who was in utero when I first read this, is now a handful of months shy of 12, and I have thought about this story probably every few weeks of his life, mainly because I have had a constant dim awareness that I have been creeping ever closer to its central premise: that teenage boys are embarrassed by their mommies. And hark, I am now on the cusp of living this short story! My sixth grader is mortified that I have volunteered to help at the book fair next week! Can you even IMAGINE how humiliating it is for your mother to set foot in your middle school?! WHAT IF SOMEONE YOU KNOW FINDS OUT YOU HAVE A MOM???

Anyway, you should read it. It is called “A Single Lady’s Manual for Parent/Teacher Night” and it is by Lara Williams, who I now know has since written a story collection and a novel, both of which I will immediately be devouring. Who knew my detective work would pay off like this?! Those hours of idle googling have not been for naught! Hopefully I’ll one day be lucky enough to find the other two. But then what would I do to procrastinate?