Paul Gorbould, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, sympathizes with the keeper as he—the keeper spends ever increasing blocks of time looking for something he has either misplaced or deliberately put away in a “safe” place.
There are cross-species precedents for such non-productive behavior: squirrels looking for buried nuts, woodpeckers trying to find seeds they have stuffed into tree bark crevices, and even dogs looking for bones they stashed in the backyard. The keeper is not much comforted by this apparent “naturalness” of looking for something; and he often acts out the definition of insanity by looking in the same place repeatedly and expecting a different result.
The keeper’s record in looking for a lost item was set a long time ago when he more or less looked 17 years for a pocket knife he had stuck in a floor joist after crawling under a cabin to check the insulation.
There has been some easing of the looking-for-something stress for the keeper as he is distracted by finding something he was not looking for, and thus forgetting what he had been looking for in the first place. The keeper calls this “substitute finding,” accepts it in the spirit of what-will-be-will-be, and some things will be forever missing.
