IS HUNTING FOR LOST THINGS FACTORED INTO GNP?

"What's the use of saving things if you're going to forget where you put them?" I muttered to myself after spending a half hour looking for a half yard of material I've been saving for weeks to make yet another fabric-covered cardboard box model house for a Christmas gift.

How I admire those who know where everything is at any given moment. Such persons fall into three classes the very young who don't have many things, the young and very observant, the extraordinary "effecientados."

I was recently discussing with a friend the time I have wasted in hunting for things I've lost, especially my glasses (meaning spectacles). She very kindly suggested that while I was thus hunting I was at least being active, bending and stooping and lying flat to peer underneath things, climbing and descending two flights of stairs, standing on tiptoe, and stamping my feet or pounding my fist if they weren't soon discovered, and happy, happenstance, finding something else I'd been looking for.

She also suggested the chain or ribbon around the neck to which I object vigorously. They fall into the lavatory, the dishwater, and get speckled on the inside.

Lest she think I be an absolute housekeeping slattern, I pointed out that I always knew where my scissors, hammer and screw driver were. And the coffee pot.

"And the teakettle," she added, laughing.

"Well, no. Not necessarily."

"How could you lose the teakettle? It's right there on your stove all the time."

"Not necessarily," I repeated. "Sometimes I take it out to a far corner of the yard to water something I'm trying to grow, and, being bemused by a slow moving tortoise, set it down to watch, or, seeing a mole erupting a silent soil volcano, I set it down and run to get the hoe and forget all about the teakettle.

"Well," she continued, returning to the spectacles, "I always put mine down in the exact same place when I take them off."

I let that go rather than ask if she was in the middle of the living room and needed to take her glasses off to do something she went all the way into the bedroom and put them on the nightstand where she assured me she always put them upon taking them off, then return to the living room to do whatever it was she needed to do without her glasses. Seemed complicated.

I rushed on to hide my boorishness by saying that sometimes I get out of a heated car into cold or take something hot out of the oven and it steams my glasses so that I'm temporarily blinded and have to take them off. "And just last week I took off a tight-neck-fitting sweatshirt before taking off my glasses and whoops! They went flying like Pegasus through the air and they landed I knew not where. I felt all over the bed, under the pillows and over the pillows. On the night table I searched behind the clock, radio, Kleenex and telephone. It had a second shelf too. I fumbled amongst the New Testament, Grayson's "Adventures in Contentment," trying my best to be contented. They weren't on the floor under the table either. A dresser drawer was open where I had intended to withdraw my gown. I took out 15 garments and shook them. Happy happenstance, among them was the half yard of material I'd been looking for.

On this happy note I went to bed. To sleep? No.

Fidgety, fidgety, fidgety. Those glasses had to be in the room somewhere and I had to have them tomorrow. In the lampshades? I turned on the lights and looked there. No glasses. Hanging over a picture frame? No.

There is an entertainment set against the wall - radio, TV, record player, all with sliding doors. I tried the doors. They all slid smoothly. The thing was too heavy for me to move.

With flashlight I looked behind the set. Couldn't see anything but a bunch of tangled wires, dust coated, and metal protuberances but what was that shiny thing? Could it be a lens? My arms weren't long enough to reach it from top or sides.

I got a thin yardstick and began to prode and rearrange wires and extension cord contrivances and soon recognized my glasses.

It took half an hour to get them disentangled from the wires, to get an ear piece anchored over the yard stick and after three tries to lift them onto the top of the entertainment set.

I was so exhausted I went to bed without putting my glasses on the bedside table.

Itt's thre daze later, nnd theyr losst adin en its deadteme fer this colyum end altho im a prety goode typest, i hoppe you can reade nnd simpataize.

REJOECI!