At our home, I am known as Finder Man. I am very proud of that title and the fact that I gave it to myself takes nothing away from it, in my opinion.
I have a superpower, that first came to light when our kids began arriving on the scene almost 23 years ago. As kids will do, they lost things. A lot. And their resultant distress bothered me so much I kicked it into high gear and would search for hours, after they’d gone to bed, sometimes, until I came up with the lost item, usually a toy.
I once trawled the bottom of a lake with my feet for a set of green swimming goggles and amazingly (to me), found them. It was not the largest lake in the world, but still, it was a lake.
Another time, a child’s pearls that had been part of a necklace, were tossed into the garbage by accident when their string broke. This was a major crisis. Unfortunately, also in that bag of wet garbage was an almost full carton of cottage cheese that had gone bad. It is incredible show much a white cottage cheese nugget resembles a child’s pearl. I spread the whole mess out on an old door in the backyard and went through the entire affair, squeezing every round piece. If it was soft, it was cheese, if it was hard, a pearl. I eventually rescued all the pearls.
Whenever something disappears, I yell out, “Don’t worry. Finder Man will find it.” And I do. Then I remind everyone in the household of my sheer amazingness. I can tell they are always on the verge of being impressed.
A few weeks ago, my wife came home discouraged, and told me she had lost a little purse and was sure she would never see it again. She tried to convince me it didn’t matter, but there was a gift inside the purse that our daughter had given her among other items she didn’t want to lose. She kept looking everywhere in the house and car but was convinced it had fallen out of her pocket downtown. So, we went downtown, to the two places outside where she thought she might have dropped it. No luck. We came home and I knew she was dejected.
The next morning, without telling her, I went back to those places to look again. At the first parking lot, there was nothing. My only hope was the other lot, closer to the city centre. I parked my car and went to a machine to pay for parking. When I turned around, I thought I saw something in the grass not far from my car. I recognized it instantly. Someone had picked up the purse, opened it and probably looked for money. Finding none, he or she threw it on the ground without zipping it closed. Its contents spilled out in the wet grass, including our daughter’s gift to my wife.
I gathered everything up and came home. My wife was on the phone. I dropped the purse on her desk in front of her. Her face wore a look of shock I will never get tired of seeing. I might have scored a kiss out of the deal, I don’t remember. Finder Man had struck again.
And this was my biggest find of all. In a city in which at least twenty, one-hundred acre farms, could fit, I found a purse, about four inches by three inches, in one of several hundred parking lots.
My reputation will outlive me. Monuments will be built, awards given in my name, books written, movies made, newborn babies named after me. But none of that matters.
They say Hell is going through life concerned only with your own welfare. Heaven is helping to make someone else happy. It has taken me a long time to find that out, but I did, because, after all, I am Finder Man.
©2018 Jim Hagarty
