One sad truth of my life is I lost stuff all the time when I was a kid; I keep losing stuff, and as sure as decaf ain’t worth squat, I’ll continue to lose stuff till the cows come home.

My inability to keep track of my things (or if you prefer, my ability to lose almost everything) is the stuff of legends. It’s as if an army had invaded the part of my brain that remembers where I leave things, laid everything to waste and then forever imposed martial law.

Long ago, I accepted that whatever I shlep around is an endangered species, so I developed a couple of coping mechanisms. One is I never have only one of anything. In the case of cheapies, like pens, lip balm and bandanas, I’ve got dozens. More expensive things, say, pocket knives, I’ve got a bunch. Things that are expensive, like my good fountain pen and good watch, I leave in the house, always in the same place. It’s a good system. But it’s hardly a perfect one, as I found out last week.

My iPad is my link with The Outside World. I’m on it a lot — to be honest, probably far too much. I use it to stay in touch with both my in- and out-of-town friends, with email or Facebook Chat. I also read a lot of the FB posts, and belong to a bunch of FB groups. Beyond that, I surf the net, ostensibly to expand my self-education, but in reality to check out seemingly endless bits of trivial and unrelated nonsense, and too often the news.

Because the iPad’s vital to me, it never leaves my house unless I take it on a trip. In my house, it’s always atop the magazine rack next to my chair. With a coffee mug on the phone table beside my chair, a cat on my lap and the iPad in my meat hooks, I can chill while at the same time fill my head with all sorts of interesting and useless stuff.

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Cursed by dybbuks?

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One morning last week, after a couple hours of being in a cybertrance, I realized my coffee mug was empty. Only one thing to do: Go in the kitchen and refill it. Easy peasy, right? Wrong!

I set the iPad down on the magazine rack, went into the kitchen and refilled my mug. Then I went back into the living room, flopped into my chair and reached for my iPad and — Holy Moly! — it was gone!

My first thought was it had slipped between a couple of magazines. I looked in the rack, separated the magazines, but no go. I picked up the magazine rack and checked underneath it. Zilch.

Next I dug in the chair cushion. Zip. So I took the cushion off, looked under it. Maybe it’d fallen in the space next to the cushion? I dug in there, found nothing. I picked up the chair and looked under it. More nothing.

I wondered if I could’ve taken it in the kitchen when I went to refill my mug. I went in and looked around and came up empty-handed and confused.

Although I knew I hadn’t gone in the bathroom, I went in and checked anyway. No dice.

I went back in the living room, looked left and right, front and center, up and down, glancing at everything, seeing nothing. I felt sweat bead up on my forehead and my pulse hammer in my ears.

At that point I should’ve sat down, taken a buncha deep breaths and emptied my mind till I’d gotten back my cool, cuz it was obvious that I’d lost it. And if that was the case, which it was, then it was equally obvious I was about to go into a frenzy. And once that happened, I couldn’t have found a 56 El Dorado on my front porch.

Nothing made sense, I was melting down. I could feel what little rationality I normally have going south like the damned swallows to damned Capistrano.

After that, everything was a blur. I looked under, over, through and in everything, including the stove and the fridge. Although I hadn’t left the house that morning, I went out and checked my car. The only result was I saw there was no El Dorado on the porch.

I was sweating like a pig and swearing like a stevedore. And it was getting me nowhere, except maybe on my way to a world-class crack-up. I was so whacked-out I was starting to think that maybe there really are dybbuks and one of them had snatched my iPad and taken off with it when I was refilling my mug.

My hysteria was disrupted by the shrieking of the phone. It was Jen-Ex. She’s one of my morning FB chat connections. She’d sent me a couple that morning and when I hadn’t replied, she wondered why (no doubt thinking I’d croaked).

“You OK?” she said.

“Hardly that,” I said. And then I launched into a barely-coherent, obscenity-laced rant of epic proportions. Finally, running out of both breath and obscenities, I stopped.

“Look,” she said, the very voice of rationality, “it’s in your living room.”

“You think so?” I said.

“No,” she said, “I KNOW so.”

“Oh?” I said. “Is this due to your amazing powers of clairvoyance?”

Unfazed by my snarkiness, she went on.

“No,” she said. “It’s due to common sense, something you currently lack.”

“All right, Ms. Thomas Paine,” I said. “So where is it?”

“It has to be within arm’s reach of your chair,” she said. “Think about it.”

“You think I haven’t?” I barked.

“I don’t think you’ve thought at all for probably the last fifteen minutes, or for however long you’ve been freaking out. But as much as I hate to break it to you, that’s exactly whatcha gotta do.”

Of course she was right and I realized it.

“Now, as much as I’d like to continue our therapy session, I’ve got to go to work,” she said. “Let me know if you find it or if I’ve got to call 911 for a wellness check.”

And with that, she was gone.

–

The two essential truths

–

Clearly, I needed a break to clear my head and calm down. And what better way to do that than take my pups out for an extended territory marking.

I leashed ’em up and we got in Honest Abe for a stroll around Pisgah. I strutted the mutts for about 45 minutes of tail-wagging delight, then we came home. Once inside, I gave them their mandatory back-from-the-walk yummy. Then they hopped in their respective (but hardly respectable) chairs and within no time they were lying in the paws of the mutts’ Morpheus, sleeping the sleep of angels.

I sat in my chair, looked at them, thought a bunch and something dawned on me.

It’s easy to keep my pups happy. All I have to do is give them their two squares and a bunch of attaboys, take them for rides in the car and long whizzings in the weeds and all’s right with their world.

As for me? Well, my time with the pups had calmed me down and I’d regained a sense of clarity. Yet a mere hour earlier I was acting like some madman out of Edgar Allen Poe. I was, for that brief bit of time, a drooling maniac. And over what — an iPad?

I cogitated some more.

The worst case scenario with the iPad would be that, yes, dybbuks DO exist, one of them had taken off to the Nether World with it, and it’d never be seen again. And then what? Well, then I could either buy a new one, or say to hell with ANY iPod and just live without one.

What would I be missing if I didn’t have an iPod? Probably a lot of depressing news, innumerable silly and self-absorbed FB postings, 10-word chats and emails and hours of daily brain clatter.

But what might I GAIN without an iPad? For one thing, a lot of free time that I could actually use productively. I’d also be gaining the chance to visit with more of my friends, practice more magic, read more books, go for more walks.

And of course, I’d spend more time with my pups, probably learning more life lessons from them than I’d ever learn from my iPad.

Ultimately, I learned two important things from this experience.

First, I could live perfectly well without an iPad.

And second, I can’t live the least bit well without a dog.