Picasso goes for a walk

Yesterday morning I was at the Atlantic/Pacific station waiting for my transfer. As the crowded train approached I realized I wouldn’t be able to continue reading and I looked for the bookmark to put it away. It wasn’t anywhere in the book.

I flipped the pages front to back. Nothing. I opened up my bag and poked and rummaged through it while getting my head almost all the way in. No sign of it there either. I lost it the way I always do – it must have fallen off the book when I took it out on the platform while waiting for the earlier train.

There it would be, lying on the ground waiting to be trampled or getting coffee spilled on. Or maybe it had been blown on to the tracks by the swish of wind that precedes the coming of trains where it would end its days flattened and sliced by the power of the machine and its hundreds of commuters or be electrocuted by the third rail.

The poor bookmark didn’t deserve it. A gift from a friend who had recently been to Barcelona, it should have been kept safer. I’m a careless bookmark keeper and now the poor Picasso cats would suffer the consequences.

I grabbed a receipt from my wallet, stuck it in the book, and got on the train to go to work

It was a long, slow day with nothing exciting to report, but when I got home I found the Picasso cats bookmark back on my bed.

Every once in a while we get a glimpse at the secret lives objects lead while we’re not looking. It’s because of a hint of that knowledge that we repeatedly lift the couch cushions looking for a remote that wasn’t there the other three times we looked – because sometimes we find it the fifth time.

Just like I found this.



Every time I went to the co-op I would check the lost and found bin for the glove I lost in late December. It wasn’t there any of the other times I checked, but when I saw it last time I went grocery shopping I couldn’t contain letting out a noise like a cat who’s found a fly on his side of the window.

The two gloves are happy to be back together, but I wonder when I’ll hear about what happened between when I lost it on 12/29/09 and when it decided to make its way back to me and join the other forlorn inmates of the co-op lost and found bin on 1/02/10.