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Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

Technically, nothing is lost until I stop looking for it.

Most men have a favorite shirt. Someone said, “You look good in that shirt.” Boom! That’s his favorite shirt. We’d wear that shirt every day if we could get by with it. I know a grown man in Alaska who owns only two shirts. They’re identical.

I stood in front of the closet. I moved my eyes and hands to every shirt in that closet — twice. It had become lost. I said, “Honey, have you seen my favorite shirt?”

My wife walked over, pulled my favorite shirt from where it wasn’t in the closet and said, “This one?”

How does she do that? I don’t know. David Copperfield is a rank amateur compared to my wife. She finds things that aren’t there.

In our small elementary school, the first thing I did each winter’s morning was to visit our school’s lost and found department, which was a large cardboard box filled with flotsam and jetsam — caps, gloves, mittens and books. Flotsam is the debris placed in the water because of a shipwreck. Jetsam is the debris deliberately thrown overboard by the crew of a ship in distress to lighten the ship’s load. I retrieved a mitten, happy to be reunited with an experienced hand-me-down friend. I pretended the lost mitten was jetsam and I needed to lighten my load for the bus ride home. I sometimes left a mitten on the bus. I never lost more than one mitten at a time. Mittens are like socks. If one goes, the other stays.

Not all my mittens were found. We kept a box of mittens and gloves whose partners had either worn out or been lost. We had no problem in saving mismatched hand coverings. It demonstrated loyalty.

In school, I got lost on my way to geography class.

I got a job at a gas station featuring a restroom that hadn’t been cleaned in 12 years, yet required a key for entry. That key was on a log chain attached to a 200-pound anvil. It was a full-service gas station, not a convenience store with a car wash. We sold chips, candy bars (mostly Snickers), peanuts, pop, oil, antifreeze, windshield wipers, maps, those little pine tree air fresheners, cigarettes and gas. I filled car tanks with gas, checked the oil and radiator levels, noticed any tire low on air, washed the windshield, examined windshield wipers, commented on the weather, told a joke, collected money and gave directions to all who asked. I knew up and down, but didn’t know how to drive anywhere except where I needed to be in that big city. I wonder where those people who followed my directions are?

Billy Graham told about a time early in his ministry when he arrived in a small town to preach. He needed to mail a letter, so he asked a boy where the post office was. The boy told him. Dr. Graham thanked him and said, “If you come to the church this evening, you can hear me telling everyone how to get to Heaven.”

“I don’t think I’ll be there,” said the boy. “You don’t even know how to get to the post office.”

The lost ages were before GPS, Siri or Google could tell us where to go, and we depended on maps. I always drove when we were first married because I thought that was my job, but my copilot had important work, too. She had to decipher maps and tell me when and where to turn.

Sometimes, not often, she’d say things like, “I think we should have turned back there.”

We got to see a lot of new and exciting places that way.

Once, in Texas, after I’d taken a wrong turn without any help, we faced nothing but unfamiliar territory and an enormous billboard asking, “What would Jesus do?” I read it aloud because I’m a reader. “What would Jesus do?”

My wife replied, “He’d stop and ask for directions.”

That was a good idea, but I rarely did that. Why not? Because I used to give people directions. I still wonder where they are today.

I’m pleased that my phone has an app that helps me find my way home.

Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday.