Pieces of You
I like lost things. People lose things when they come to the library. From time to time I love to go through our lost and found at work. I did so yesterday while I was looking for someone’s lost computer disk. I didn’t find the disk but there was a wallet there, or something like a wallet. I especially like lost wallets. People carry little extensions of themselves with them wherever they go; wallets, purses, glove boxes, lockers, cars, back pockets, etc. By examining the contents you can learn much about the owner. It was a cheap, worn, plastic green billfold and it was dirty with a certain level of greasy grim that comes with so many of our returned books. I don’t know what people do to those books to get them so dirty in one months time. Anyway, inside the wallet were several slots for the carrying of things. Here is what I found. An expired Texas ID, and expired California ID, and expired Washington ID, 2 ID cards for a homeless shelter downtown (one of which was expired), a Safeway grocery card, 2 bank deposit slips, a business card with the phone number of a local social security office, an appointment slips for DSHS, and several biblically oriented positive encouragement reminders (“god loves you” and the such). I had in my possession a great deal of personal information about a woman I had never met. I knew how much she weighted, where she had lived, that she was or is homeless, where she shops for groceries, how much money she had in the bank, and maybe even some of her spiritual beliefs. I could easily speculate that this woman was and probably has been down on her luck for quite some time. I could guess that she was trying to pull herself back up, that she still had hope. She seemed to have a hard time letting go of the past, maybe because to do so would remove her motivation for the future. She probably had a plan. It wasn't so much the known facts that interested me. It was the unknown that fascinated me. There was one more thing in her wallet. It was a folded, frayed piece of red fabric. It obviously held some significance to her to put it in her wallet. What could it be? Where did it come from? It set me to thinking which is a dangerous thing for a man with an overactive imagination. Could it be something as mundane as a color sample she was trying to match for a wall in her new apartment? Could it be a memorial piece of a backpack from a trip she took across Europe with her now dead father? Could it be part of a shirt from her daughter that the state took away from her? Could it be something she uses to stop the blood after she shoots up in an alley somewhere? Was it simply symbolic of her life, frayed, stained, worn thin and yet still held safe in the plastic arms of a greasy wallet. It could have been for just about anything. It was that little bit of fabric that made this woman real to me. Take out your wallet and see what it says about you. What would someone else think if they found it? Also please put a phone number in there so when someone does find it they can contact you and return the little piece of you that has been lost.