Family, Food, home, Uncategorized, Weather

Losing It

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We had three inches of rain in the past week, and Husband decided he could safely fire up his smoker/grill to smoke a couple of pork butts we had in the freezer. There has been a burn ban all summer due to extraordinary drought, so this was the first time since May he has been able to grill outside.

The butts smoked beautifully all day in pecan and hickory chips, and by dark they were done. Husband used a very large carving fork to remove them from the smoker. He brought the butts inside the kitchen. The fork disappeared somewhere between the grill area outside and the house. We have searched high and low in the garage, the smoker/grill, the garbage, and the shrubs surrounding the grill area, to no avail. Husband, who is part Scots and believes in ghosts, thinks there was Divine intervention and this was a joke played on us by the supernatural.

I reported earlier this year on the Trail that I thought I saw my late father’s ghost in the hallway one night. He loved playing jokes on people, and I could see him hiding the carving fork somewhere ridiculous for us to find later. I am pretty sure the fork will turn up one of these days and we will say “Oh yes, I forgot I went here after the pork was inside!” Until then I will scold my dad and tell him to reveal where the carving fork is.

What have you lost? Which of your ancestors would love to play a joke on you? What do you think they would do?

51 thoughts on “Losing It”

  1. There isn’t much I haven’t lost.
    I bought a dismantled 250 cc BSA Blue Star for five pounds in the winter of 1968, and immediately dismantled it further, in great excitement. (a few years later, when I bought my ex brother in law’s Bonneville, someone said to me, “Don’t take this one to pieces, Fenton.” Don’t know what he meant.) Those pieces are now at their ninth location, including a temporary home down at the field, before coming to my rented garage around the corner. Most moves have entailed inexplicably losing another part of the bike. It’s actually relatively rare, because it was too new for the emerging vintage cult in the fifties, and in fact there seemed to be a grudge against Blue Stars in particular, so that they weren’t valued. There are a few more of the bigger ones, but I really should put this one together while there’s at least some of a two fifty left. Only got possibly thirty years now.

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  2. Wrenches:
    Really they’re called spanners, but I’m making a concession to win favour. I have probably lost at least a hundred since my late teens. I kept my Bonneville in a failed greenhouse with a dirt floor. I was working on the bike with a black openend wrench, maybe four inches long, and I dropped it. No, I didn’t take it outside. I dropped it while working on the bike, inside the greenhouse. I never saw it again, and believe me, I looked. Unusually for me, there was nothing else in there. It had to be there. But it wasn’t. And ghosts don’t exist.

    Oh, sorry. It was probably a Williams Superslim. Should be called Superbend, I know, no good for serious work, but I just like them, and have always had quite a few. I’ve got plenty of decent wrenches for more difficult nuts and bolts, that’s if I haven’t lost them.

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  3. I was about 4 years old when I left my favorite security blanket on a fencepost somewhere on the North Shore (that is in Minnesota near Duluth.) My mother said I took it in stride, so I guess I was ready to give it up.

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    2. I never knew a Danish kid who had a blankie, it was just not a thing. The first one I encountered belonged to four year old Elizabeth in Moscow. It wasn’t actually a blanket but rather a nasty, blue, rag of a a mohair sweater. It was dirty, sticky, smelly, and as a I said, nasty, so on my first day on the job, I threw it in the washer, and gave it a spin in the dryer. It came out nice and fluffy and clean but practically untouchable due to static electricity. Poor Elizabeth, who was really a sweet little girl, lost it, and I thought I had forever ruined our relationship before it even started. Luckily within a day or two the moisture in the summer air had remedied the problem and all was forgiven. But I learned my lesson with regard to blankies, the cruddier they are the more comfort they exude, apparently.

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      1. YA had a blankie . In fact she was very attached to it and about the only punishment that really worked for her was to put the blankie into “toy time out”. This was a nuclear action on my part and it really only happened two or three times in her whole life. As blankie got more and more ragged, it got smaller and smaller because I would fold it in half and sew it around the edges. Eventually I couldn’t get it through the sewing machine anymore but luckily that was about the time that YA decided she didn’t need it anymore.

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  4. I put a nice little ring spanner on the footplate of my Fordson Major and drove the last twenty or thirty yards across the field, to the gate into the next field. That “wrench” was gone and I never saw it again. I left wheelmarks in the grass! The grass wasn’t very long! I could see the bare earth between the blades of grass! I could NOT see that wrench. It was the same field my caravan was in, and I looked for that wrench many times. Maybe Graham picked it up years later and thought, that’s a handy wrench. And it was, it was probably an Elora or Bedford, half inch by seven sixteenths. You can see why I didn’t want to lose it.

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  6. Devonians mostly, in fact, refer to spanners as wrenches. So if Graham DID pick up that spanner, he really could well have thought “that’s a handy wrench.”

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  7. Every so often, I notice that one of my books has mysteriously disappeared. I don’t think its ghosts though. I think some of the older books, their vital essence depleted, absorb the younger books.

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  8. Rise and Haunt the House Baboons,

    My dad was a notorious trickster, once described by a childhood pal as “the orneriest child I ever knew.” When my cousin would come over for a meal, he would steal her food (he gave it back) by saying, “look Gail, Mrs Cunningham (neighbor) has on pink polka dot shorts,”or “there is an elephant out there”, or some other nonsense, then hide her plate. If he comes back to haunt us, he will take our dinner plate.

    My sister and I dreamt the same dream on the same night 3 months after he died, but other than that, we have not felt haunted by him.

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  9. Heck, I’ve lost so many things… still looking for the wedding band. Thought I found it in the shop one day but that was just a silver flat washer.
    Wrenches, hitch pins, the autographed picture of Flip Wilson, the autographed picture of Hank Ketchum (Dennis the Menace illustrator)

    I don’t picture any of my ancestors playing tricks… they were a pretty serious bunch from what I’ve heard.
    There was great uncle George. He had a twinkle in his eye. Maybe that was his glass eye… I bet he’d play a joke.
    I attended a funeral on Saturday for a cousin. “Duke” always had a story to tell and a joke to go with. According to the funeral program, he carried a laminated copy of this joke in his billfold:

    “A man and woman were driving down the road in silence. They’d had an argument earlier and neither was ready to concede their position yet. As they drove past a farm with pigs, goats, and cows the husband said to the wife, ‘Relatives of yours?’ She responded, ‘Yep. The In-laws’ “

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  10. Husband has a t-shirt that says “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.” I’m goin’ with that. One thing that would be nice – a new way the afterlife works (see a book called Sumby David Eagleman) – At some point, I want back all the time I spent searching for lost things. It must be months, nay, years!…

    I’d like to have my mom’s mom come back and dance with me. Mom’s dad would, I think, be totally into playing some kind of joke on us. There were 7 kids, and Mom said when the noise got to be too much, he would say (probably yell) “A little more noise, please!”

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  11. OT- Molly just let me know Steve is in the hospital since Friday with pneumonia. He will be discharged probably Friday. Let’s hope we don’t lose him.

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  12. Most of the things that I’ve lost are my own fault. I am a classic “I’ll put it here so remember where I put it” kind of gal. And then of course I remember saying that to myself but do I remember where I actually put the item??! I had a list of passwords about 5-6 years ago now and I remember putting it someplace where I would remember where I could get out it. Even after 5-6 years I still haven’t found it.

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    1. Just today I was working on something and I had this bracket in my hand, and I looked up at an open vent and thought ‘set it there’ and then i caught myself and said ‘Don’t put that there!’ and I listened to my little Voice and put it on the work bench so I knew where it was.

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  13. I don’t know as much about my ancestors of some of the other baboons . But I just can’t envision that they don’t have better things to do than be trying to find out ways to bug me.

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  14. When my mom loses something, she’ll say “Yehudi took it”. (I hope that’s not anything racist!) And there is a lovely old song ‘The Little Man who wasn’t there’. I can’t find the version I hear on the ’40’s station, but that one references Yehudi. Maybe it’s a relative??

    Here’s another version:

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    1. I remember my folks occasionally calling someone “a regular Yehudi,” the Yehudi being Yehudi Menuhin, who was a prodigy on the violin and in the 1930s was very famous. Their meaning was that that person was clever, a prodigy.

      I suspected that at that time Yehudi was a household name and fun to say and it just got applied to things. This seems to confirm that:
      https://www.waywordradio.org/yehudi-did-it/

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      1. Yehudi Menuhin was very much an artist I was very aware of as I was growing up, so not just phenom that was known in the thirties as a child prodigy. He was not only an extrordinary musician but a remarkable and interesting human being.

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    1. Harvested the last of our tomatoes today, and cooked up another batch of tomato based sauce. A pretty generic sauce so that I can freeze it in smaller portions that lend themselves to different interpretations. This has really been a remarkable year for gardening, but I agree, we’re ready to give it a rest. Tomorrow, it’ll be the last of the basil, celery, parsley and herbs.

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  17. I had been thinking of Steve before I read Molly’s report. My daughter had a huge and complex funeral today. A 79 year old man agreed to drive school bus. He had the license. So he drove. Got breakthrough COVID, had massive stroke from lung damage. He was beloved in the area despite often being surly and difficult.
    Do find rest, my friend. Grow strong, my other friend Steve

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    1. How are you holding up, Clyde? Is Sandy settling in and calming down? I hope that you’ll soon be able to settle into a routine that’s comfortable for the two of you. Are you preparing to move as well?

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      1. Everything is up in the air because of business having my ssn as their ein. I need documentation and bank will not provide it. If I do not get it, do not know what happens.
        And waiting for 11/11 dr appt

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  18. Right now I am missing one disc from an audiobook I have checked out from the library. The audio book went back and forth from the house to the car so many times I lost track of where I last listened to that particular disc. I think it is in the car, but I’ll have to get a flashlight and crawl in to look under the seats.

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