Have you seen the things I've lost? Just asking. Thirty-four years ago, I lost my high school senior ring when my house was burglarized. I know you and I have never met, and I know the burglary was a long time ago, but that ring must be somewhere, right? Maybe it ended up in your possession by way of a garage sale, a visit to an antique store, a find on the street, or some other way unfathomable to me right now.
I am also looking for Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. I know I lent those three books to different people, though I cannot remember who, and at different times, though I can't remember when. Actually, I have a good suspicion of who borrowed the Csikszentmihalyi book, but I dare not ask him out of embarrassment because he has gifted me so many books over the years. Sometimes I will bring up this matter in a conversation with him, saying something like, "I'm still trying to find that Csikszentmihalyi book but can't for the life of me find it." I get no response from him, which makes me wonder if he has lied to me about many other things throughout our long friendship. I still want to look up things in those books, but I refuse to buy another copy in the hope that someone, maybe you, might return them. One point I should make about the Rukeyser book. My wife insists that I never owned it, that it was just a wish list book. But how can she know all of the thousand or so books I have owned? Plus, I recall like it was yesterday thumbing through Rukeyser's poems, feeling alternately helplessness, numbness, hopefulness. How could I have not owned that book? For this and other reasons, I have stopped lending people books. They never return them unless I ask for them, and I cannot bring myself to ask.
Now you might be thinking if I cannot bring myself to ask people I know to return the things I've lent them, then how could I possibly ask you, a total stranger, to return something in the improbable event that they ended up in your possession? I would say you've got an excellent point, I would thank you for raising it, and I would reflect on that fine piece of logic, as I also ponder all I have lost. But, believe me: even though I have no proper answer for you, I will still ask if you have them. And who are you not to answer?
