By Jim Hagarty
2006
I hate losing things.
Some people just shrug off the temporary or permanent loss of a possession, but I can’t stand to be deprived of something that belongs to me, even if it has little or no value.
So, when faced with the prospect of never again seeing the thing which I have lost, I go into an extravagant recovery mode that defies logic. Last week, on vacation with my children, I dredged the bottom of a lake we were swimming in, to find a pair of green goggles. The goggles cost $3.97 plus tax to buy, so you can see that such a significant investment would require extraordinary efforts to reclaim what the water had swallowed up.
I organized a search party of three – my brood and I – and we carefully combed the lake bottom with our feet in a grid pattern I had mapped out. After about 20 minutes, something caught on my big toe. I raised my foot in glory: Green goggles dangled there.
My joy was shortlived. An hour later, the goggles disappeared again and this time, the lake had its victory, despite another search.
You might have gathered, from this column and previous ones, that I have trouble letting go of things. I have become aware that I am not alone in this. There are, in fact, many people who are far more afflicted in this direction than I. They cannot part with anything and their possessions eventually form a kind of emotional stranglehold that cripples their lives.
Perhaps that is why some people who have lost their home through fire or some other catastrophe, testify later that, except for the loss of irreplaceable memorabilia such as photos and videos, losing their former home ended up being a freeing thing. Disaster achieved what they couldn’t bring themselves to do – discard that which they didn’t need – and they began to live again.
Maybe it’s an Ontario thing. A quarter century ago, I spent three months in Edmonton and along the way, formed an opinion about Albertans that l’m sure isn’t very accurate and is a naive generalization. But at that time, in any case, it seemed to me that many of them – at least the ones I met – were less security conscious than us easterners. Money was not to be accumulated and trapped so as to never see the light of day. It was to be used and enjoyed.
My one friend, for example, carried a wallet so full of cash he could hardly close it. And he had no problem parting with any of those bills, if the mood struck him, for a good meal or a piece of clothing that grabbed his fancy.
And from him I learned a lesson in how seriously we should take our possessions. One night, he drove his restored 1955 Chevy into a fast-food restaurant parking lot and pulled up beside a sleek, white Pontiac Firebird. He immediately fell in love with the sports car next to him and as he got out to examine it more closely, the owner of that car walked over and took an envious look up and down at the classic old Chevy. Eventually, after a brief discussion, the two men decided to trade cars, there and then. They exchanged ownerships, climbed into each other’s vehicles and drove off, without any money changing hands.
I have always marvelled at that story and how it flies in the face of our modern ownership ethic. I cannot imagine doing what my friend did; I’d have to go home and think about it for a week or two and make sure my ’55 Chevy wasn’t worth more than the Firebird. By the time I was ready to make a move, the other fellow would have moved on.
Some day, of course, ready or not, we all have to leave all our stuff behind. As a line from a popular country song once said, you never see a moving van following a hearse. Nevertheless, being human, we all need a certain amount of stuff.
Such as invaluable green goggles.
