Random thoughts lead him close to buried treasure
The piano bench! That’s the one place I hadn’t looked. It had to be there!
My life has been sprinkled with family members, friends and a whole mess of teachers who have implied the way my brain tends to randomly switch tracks and go chugging off into random directions is a sign of some sort of mental malady. I have frequently reassured those delivering their diagnoses that my thoughts are a lot less erratic than they believe.
Whatever the cause, I regard that same tendency as a gift of adventure. I never know what direction my musings will take me.
The “piano bench” brainstorm came to me on a bike ride (my most fertile rookery of unsolicited ideas), and it arrived after dodging a red-winged blackbird that dove straight for my head. Even though I knew darn well what the attempted assault was all about, the incident got me thinking about a book a friend had given me several years ago titled “What It’s Like To Be a Bird” by David Allen Sibley. It explains all sorts of bird peculiarities and behaviors, and it easily became one of my favorites the moment I opened the cover.
Unfortunately, my new treasure had gone missing only a few months after its arrival in my house, and years of random conjuring had delivered not a single fertile clue as to its whereabouts. Now here, on a dirt road in the middle of Amish Country, I was convinced I’d nailed it. I rushed home and ran to the piano.
While the bench accompanying our century-old piano is quite typical, its use has been anything but. Without a musician in the family, the instrument itself is more of a 1,000-pound display stand than an instrument. The matching bench has served mostly as a magazine cache, junk drawer and sometimes crypt for the past 30 years.
Based on the National Geographic at the top of the stack inside, I was quickly able to determine the bench had not been opened in at least five years. Digging further only took me further through history. My bird book was not in the box.
Kristin happened upon me just as I slumped into dismay.
“What are you doing in there?” she asked. “Last time I opened that piano bench, I found the petrified remains of a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich!”
“No sandwich this time,” I said. “I just had a thought that my bird book might be in here.”
Both low-level hoarders, each of us frequently misplaces things that suddenly become “important.” The search to locate such items is so often fruitless that we rarely get caught up in each other’s quests. This time, however, out of an apparent sense of gratitude for when I had recently “found” the missing car keys for her (they were actually hanging on the key rack where they belonged), Kristin decided to help.
“Hmmm, where was the last place you saw it?” she said — a question that was easily as useless as it was irritating.
“It’s been years, Kristin, years! What sort of a question is that?”
“Well, like, since before we got Frankie?” she asked. “I’m just wondering because we used to keep books in this basket of Frankie’s toys.”
She pointed to a wicker basket right beside the piano, now filled to overflowing with squeaky balls, stuffed monkeys and gnawed-white ham bones.
We immediately set about digging side by side through the three-year chronology of our spoiled hound dog’s playthings. Within minutes I was reunited with the missing manual. Had it not been for my random thoughts, I’d still be looking.
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.