Gone Missing

Frank is a highly organized person. In the military, he had a job like Cpl. Klinger, keeping track of avionics supplies. Nothing went missing on Frank’s watch. Recently, however, he bought a piece of cheese that disappeared. The eight ounces of sharp cheddar started out on Wednesday in the refrigerator where it cozied up to the romano. But on Friday, when he went in for a snack, the cheese had moved out. I was called in as a consultant, checking all the shelves including the ones on the door and even the freezer. No cheese. Some hours later, I was setting the table for shabbos dinner when I went into the junk drawer to the right of the refrigerator to get the kitchen matches for candle lighting. You know the drawer. It’s the one with the rubber bands and twist ties…and there it was, a shabbos miracle. Slightly soft and slimy but salvageable. The cheese hadn’t really left home. It had just taken a break, a mental health day.

Photo by Limi change on Unsplash

We all understand this impulse, the desire for some unstructured alone time. Maybe hanging out with some previously used pieces of tin foil that aren’t judging you for your fat content. It’s a relief to be doing nothing in a secret place far from those smug vegetables. The whole point of a junk drawer is that it makes no demands for order or coherence. Anything goes in the junk drawer. I have another one in my night table. This one is more of a cut-rate pharmacy offering throat lozenges and surgical tape, as well as an electronics graveyard. In the righthand corner, nearest to me when I go to bed, I keep my sleep mask and the deck of cards I’ve owned since the Eisenhower administration and must have near me at all times in case I need to play insomniac solitaire. Each person’s junk drawer is idiosyncratic and will yield invaluable information for future archaeological research. Mine has a Harris-Walz button. A junk drawer is sometimes a sad place. But it is nevertheless always a place where the relentless striving of modern life is suspended for a time. It is a celebration of randomness, of eccentricity, and in this respect is another theater of resistance.

My father introduced me to the rationale of deep disorder when he showed me the intentional chaos in his antique store. You might think that customers would prefer merchandise to be arranged neatly by usage, all the candy dishes on one shelf, or by country of origin, all the French porcelain on one wall. You would be wrong. What people wanted was a chance to meander amongst the dusty, grimy merchandise in search of a treasure they didn’t know they wanted. Or sometimes the thrill of discovery of an item they could bring home and add to their collection, a sterling silver thimble, an enamel oyster fork. This glorious mess functioned as a liberation from the tedium of the supermarket, the cereal aisle, the dogfood aisle. Like the missing piece of cheese, I need a certain amount of disorder, of rule-breaking, the way I need to experience the expansion of time. I need days without structure so that I can see where they might take me and who I might be.

I imagine that the cheese was conflicted. She had to reckon with her loss of freedom when she was returned to her chilly old space now shared with the unfamiliar bok choy and the slightly threatening plastic take-out containers. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she had moved on and no longer belonged in the old neighborhood. I’m hoping her sense of wellbeing was restored when she remembered her origins in the milk pail and realized that she could experiment with spaciousness longitudinally. Where was she before she found herself in the milk pail? In the cow, of course. That large, fly-ridden bovine with flaring nostrils and engorged udders. She recalled somehow the scent of the cow and the sound of her chewing her cud. She remembered the endless acres of Wisconsin grass and clover and wildflowers where the cow grazed and took in the nutrients she needed to produce the milk that would become the cheese. She remembered the sunshine and rain that blanketed the meadow. The cheese saw that there was a vast world beyond the dairy shelf in the store and in the refrigerator. There were sojourns in the junk drawer to be experienced from time to time and there was the whole of creation to belong to and savor this particular shabbos.

*********************************************************************************************************

Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard. Write to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.