The Things We’ve Lost and Where They’re Found

The pancake batter bowl is missing.

I have twice opened and shut every kitchen cabinet drawer it could have been stuffed into by one of three children annoyed by the daily chore of unloading the dishwasher groooooan. Maybe it was the jesterly husband with all his high-minded opinions about where and how certain dishes ought to be stacked. Perhaps an unaware parent, eager to help but unsure where her grown daughter stores such vessels, placed it in the most unlikely place.

Why is the place they think makes the most sense never where I would have stashed it? I’ve even searched the other realms where our children hide things: bathroom vanities, the basement sink, the “Man Cave” where all the empty snack bags and candy wrappers congregate.

I have asked all three children and, wouldn’t you know it, none of them know the whereabouts of the pancake batter bowl. It has gone the way of other things that have disappeared this year: the lid to my husband’s travel mug, cookie cutters, the KitchenAid mixer bowl, one of four African dwarf frogs from our fish tank, the functionality of my autonomic nervous system, 45 other halves to unmatched socks, the 872 words and actors and movie titles I’ve misplaced, enough bits to make a villanelle to rival Elizabeth Bishop.

Add it to the long line of leavers this year, the grandparents and songwriters and lovers, the lost jobs and lost businesses and lost health and lost dogs and lost balance, everything Lost now huddling somewhere together safely and sadly but soundly in the Found.

One of them is hiding my pancake batter bowl, I just know it.

There are other bowls, of course, stainless steel and glass in various sizes and depths, but this one had a handle and spout. It had a flat bottom perfect for mashing bananas with a potato masher, perfect for every Saturday banana pancake morning, perfect for pouring onto the electric griddle where the batter sizzled and bubbled and popped in its puddle of melted butter. It’s what we hoped to do this morning, my youngest son and I, make the banana pancakes, pretend like it’s the weekend now, Jack Johnson style.

We must make do with a lesser container. The metal of the masher smacks against the curved edge and misses large chunks of banana. My youngest son cracks the eggs and begins whisking the batter while the griddle warms. He doesn’t seem to understand my distress. While he whisks, I open and shut the cabinet drawers I’ve already checked once more. He is nine. The last ten months of remote learning have been divine hours spent home with Mom and Minecraft, making banana pancakes and pretending like it’s the weekend just about every day. We pray and hug and ritually kiss forehead then chin then cheek then cheek then nose then lips each night. He prays for the virus to go away, prays for the vaccine to come, prays his mom will feel better, prays the sick people will be healed, prays the leaders would just listen for once, prays for friends and children of Lost ones to be comforted. 

It is cruel, the way so much has been stolen, whether snatched from us or trashed, or abandoned in the fort the kids built in the woods (I still suspect the conniving wide-eyed convicts who live here), so much just simply and profoundly lost no one in all this remote and distanced space can find the space to make sense of it. The writers send perilous tweets and private messages, abandon hopes of narrative. The artists paint faces with missing appendages. The satellite news commentators fill the screen with ticker tape and numbers I fear will start turning over as I watch, like an old-fashioned trip odometer, turning over in real-time like the real-time loss that’s actually happening instead of the quiet, sad update a graphics coordinator must do during commercial breaks.

I search my bookshelf for answers but come up short on titles I must have lent to friends, this one you must read, I said, missives of hope and light packed tight between paperback covers. These ones aren’t lost but borrowed, perhaps passed on and dog-eared, each one a little gospel I’ve sent and preached as powerful against the darkness. I finished one such book today by Brian Doyle, a writer lost to cancer, the posthumous work One Long River of Song aptly subtitled, Notes on Wonder.

“Lost” something one gets inside these pages, “lost” somewhere one finds oneself again.

“I think I am a miracle,” my youngest son says, while whisking the eggs and banana and vanilla and peanut butter that will turn from frothy liquid into solid, flat and flippable cakes we’ll smother in maple syrup in a minute. “I think I’m a miracle, because when I give you Henry hugs I make you feel better.” 

All, it turns out, is not lost.

I have lost the pancake batter bowl, or the pancake batter bowl was taken, or the pancake batter bowl is stashed in the most unreasonable place and will turn up again someday, after it’s been replaced, the interior scratched from these last 17 years of being beaten for pancake batter. It will limp up the front walk with a crutch under its one handle. It will have that look in its eye, that look that knows nothing can ever be again as it once was, but at least it’s home. At least it’s home.

Photo by Flora Westbrook from Pexels