I had a chance to show off my superpower today. I have only one, and I'm very good at it. I find things. Specifically, I find important items other people lose, and are frantically searching for. I can't count how many mornings my man has freaked out, unable to find his keys or wallet, so he could go to work. It was always up to me to find them, in the weirdest places. But this isn't my superpower. This is more like training for the Olympics than actually competing. Today was the real thing. I was out to lunch with my group, and there were two new members. At the end of a fabulous meal (yet another restaurant featured on television, for good reason), the waitress came back with our scanned credit cards, minus one. Between scanning the cards and bringing them to us, the card belonging to one of the new women went missing. The waitress was in a panic, and the woman was thinking she had to go back to her bank for the third time this summer, to get another card (and pay another fee to replace it). I watched the waitress look all over the diner-style bar area, looking under objects, on shelves, on the dining floor, and she was at a loss. My friend and I stood up and walked around a booth to help. I did what I always do: I paused, blocked out everything but what I wanted to find, and then looked right at it, deep under the ice machine behind the bar. The relief on the waitress was palpable, to know for certain it hadn't been stolen out from under her nose, and she wouldn't be blamed. And I had proof that I still have the touch.
I think my favorite recent episode of this was when I worked for the mom and pop gift shop/plant nursery in New Mexico. It was in an old house, maybe a hundred years old, and the store covered the house, a huge winding garden area, and a couple outbuildings. One night, when I was working in the main house, in the jewelry room, the owner came in, at a loss to find his keys. By the time he came by me, he had been searching maybe 20 minutes. I didn't ask many questions. I mostly just "listened" for the keys. I told him I would be right back (I had to point out that I was walking away from the cash register), and I left the main house, walked through the parking lot, past the garden entrance where he spent nearly all of his time, and went into the storeroom. Storage was in the two-room outbuilding that had once been a guest cottage, and it was packed as tight as any hoarders home on cable television. I went straight to the back, without hesitation, chose the left path to shelves, and reached behind a stack of candles and grabbed the keys. When I told him where I found them, and that I had gone directly to them, he looked at me like I was either crazy, or had been following him and he didn't realize it or like it.
I'm usually very able to remember where anything is in my house, as if everything in the three dimensional space around me is sequentially coded. When there are instances where I can't find something, which is rare, but it happens, I absolutely lose my mind. It almost invariably turns out that someone, human or canine or feline, has moved it from the last place I saw it. More often, even if things are buried under papers on a counter, or under a stack of laundry, or deep in a drawer, I just have to ask the item to be revealed, and it's there. If I ever lose this skill, it will be more than I can bear.
I didn't take any new photos today. I don't really have any examples of lost and found items. The closest I have is of someone hiding, specifically my daughter's ex-roommate's cat. It's a reach, but I didn't want to go completely without a photo today.
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