Some 20-odd years ago, in college, I received a St. Christopher medal from a friend. I loved it for it’s heaviness, and for the compass on the back with a ship and train and car and a plane. This friend and I crossed the friendship/lover line many times during the 5 or 6 years we were there; some time after we went our separate ways, he to Kansas and me further west, I sent the medallion back to him in the mail. I was being grumpy; it’s been my tendancy to not keep letters or pictures of past relationships.
Well, he never got it, as I found out later. Then I really WAS sad about it, because by then I’d decided that I’d much rather have kept it than just have it lost. And I have never seen one quite like it since.
I mentioned this on another board of friends, and someone apparantly googled and found what looked like an identical medal on Etsy. Time has moved on and any negative associations have been long wiped out, so I was psyched. And when I got the medal, the town it was sent from is the very town I sent it to, or tried to!
So this isn’t the best example, but I really do feel like a little lost piece of me has returned.
I’m sure some of you have far more interesting stories, and I hope you share.
This happened about 30 years ago. Our house was broken into while we were on vacation. Some petty losses (small TV, etc), and one that really hurt: an antique Colt .45 revolver that had been personally given to me by my beloved grandfather. It had belonged to his father. Although it was in very good working condition, it wasn’t particularly rare or precious; the extraordinary value was sentimental. I reported the break-in and theft to the police, including the gun’s serial number.
Fast forward seven years.
I got a phone call at work from a San Diego Police Detective, telling me that a gun I’d reported stolen seven years before had been recovered during an arrest. They had to hold it as evidence against the perp, but I was happy to wait for it. Seven months later I had to appear in court, take the stand, and identify it as the gun I’d reported stolen. A couple of weeks later it was back in my hands. It had been badly mishandled and was in terrible condition. It also had been crudely modified to have an extremely dangerous hairtrigger. I had an expert in L.A. restore it, but never got around to firing it again. It rests in my safe.
SDPD had been cruising a residential neighborhood one morning, spotted an outlaw-biker type guy working under the hood of a car. It was broad daylight, but something looked off to the cop, so he pulled over and parked behind the car that was being worked on. Got out of his car, and as he walked toward the guy under the hood he glanced into the car and saw a sawed-off shotgun sitting in plain sight on the passenger seat. Drew his gun and arrested the guy without a struggle. My Colt, loaded and dangerous (hairtrigger), was tucked into the guy’s waistband. Location of the arrest: about three blocks from my workplace. The car, shotgun, and revolver were all stolen, and if I remember correctly they nailed the guy for other thefts as well.
Videos of Sophie’s first 7 years, including her baptism, first steps, first solid foods, school functions, Christmas’s, Easter Egg hunts, Halloweens, “a day in the life” stuff where I just let the camera run. We were heartbroken.
I looked in a box about 2 months ago and there they were!
Trust me, they have been digitized and duplicated by now. Whew!
Cookie Monster, when she was a kitten, knocked over the Christmas tree and smashed a load of baubles. I removed all the broken glass, but left the wire tops of the baubles lying around prior to disposal. There was one particular wire that she was fascinated with. She played with it constantly, and would walk around the house with the wire in her mouth, and take it into her bed. I blunted up the ends of the wire and tied a ribbon onto it to make it safe and visible and harder to swallow by accident, and for about six months it was her favored companion; she ignored catnip mice or anything else we bought for her, but would stalk and throw and carry this stupid wire. After a while it went missing and that was that.
Eventually we bought our own place. We packed everything up and moved to our new house. After having lived there for two or three years, one day Cookie trotted into the center of the living room, and to my astonishment, in her mouth was her favorite wire. She happily escorted it around the place like her very own kitten for the next year or so.
She’s eleven now and the wire has made it to yet another house in another country by similar means, and while she doesn’t love it like she did, she still plays with it from time to time. I have no idea where it went to, or how it survived the moves, nor indeed how she found it. It still perplexes me.
Someone broke into his car when he was making hospital rounds and stole his bag. Didn’t do them much good — he never carried anything much stronger than aspirin — but the bag contained the stethoscope he’d had since his first year in medical school. He was . . . “devastated” is too strong a word, but as upset as I remember seeing him.
Flash forward fifteen or twenty years. My mother got a call one afternoon from a construction company who was excavating a foundation and found the bag. The stethoscope was still inside, somewhat the worse for wear but intact. She had it mounted in a presentation box and gave it to him on his next birthday.
I’m not sure whether he was buried with it (it was a fairly chaotic time), but it would have been appropriate.
I just mentioned this story again on a recent thread:
My godmother and her husband had a cabin on an island (Lake of the Woods) way up north in Canada. They had bought the cabin shortly after they were married, and she lost her wedding ring while picking blueberries that first season up there. Every year she would try to find it, with no luck.
Fast forward 40 years or so, and her granddaughter came into the cabin one summer day and said, “Look what I found grandma!” and it was the wedding ring she had lost all those years ago.
This is sort of off-topic, but I have* found* things that I am sure someone is missing. Lately, our cats have begun finding presents underneath the cabinets in our rental, which have no kickboard. There’s probably tons of things under there, but I’m sure not looking. One day they were playing with a silver ring, and I took it away, thinking it was my husbands. It was not; it is a double ring that spins around, with what looks like eastern indian writing engraved on the outside. Made in…Pakistan, I think. Will have to find it. What’s funny is that it fits me perfectly and I wear it often; it’s the ring that my cats got me.
Another one is that my mom found a bracelet in the woods in Maine when she was about 12. She gave it to me a few years ago; it’s always been my favorite thing. I can’t wear it, because 1. I hate loose things on my wrists, and a tightly-bound watch is the furthest I’ll go and 2. I’m afraid one of the charms will fall off. It feels like gold-sprayed pewter, and I know how soft pewter is.
One of these days I’m going to write a story about how that bracelet came to be lost, and found…maybe it’d been lost and found before; maybe stretch it out through a couple of generations.
Oh, and once I deliberately threw a ring into the ocean near the shore, so that someone else could find it later on and have a surprise. It wasn’t an expensive ring, it had no sentimental value other than I bought it for myself, but for some reason it seemed the thing to do at the time.
In the early 90s, I used to wear a Star of David necklace inherited my grandfather, who was appropriately named Dave. I also played a lot of volleyball. My dorm had a sand court, and I spent a lot of time there.
I usually took the chain off while playing, and put it back on afterwards. One day, I was distracted and forget to put it back on.
I checked back the next day, and couldn’t find the chain. Luckily, someone happened by with a metal detector! Sadly, it didn’t detect anything.
Fast forward to the next school year…like 10 months later…I’m at the same dorm, resting between games. I look down, and see what looks like a ring in the sand. I think to my self that I know how much it sucks to lose something in the sand…so I go to pick it up to turn it in at the front desk. To my complete amazement, it was my necklace.
When I was a little girl, age 3 or 4, chasing after the ice cream truck one summer day, I dropped one of the quarters Mom had given me. I knew it was somewhere close to the street, but I lost it in the long grass and couldn’t find it, and was still searching for it long after the ice cream truck was gone.
About 20 years later, while searching the yard with a metal detector looking for the steel pins that marked the border of the lot, the quarter was located instead. It looked slightly chewed up from the lawn mower but otherwise fine.
I was more surprised that I actually remembered losing the quarter in the first place.
When I was eleven, I received my very first pocket knife for Christmas. My great uncle Doug laughed and said" I have two predictions, you’re going to cut yourself, then lose it in the next four hours."
I scoffed and laughed, but I’ll be damded if I didn’t cut myself, then lost it down the heater vent. Thirty years later, my folks were getting the heater replaced, and my dad found the knife.
I got it in my Christmas Stocking again that year!
I’m not old enough to have anything from THAT long ago show up. But one time I did find a pair of glasses I had thought were gone forever (they were missing for lke 2 years). They were under the seat of my car.
Not much time elapsed here, but you’ll see why I think it’s worthy. A few years ago I was frequently going between the Bay Area and Portland for work. For whatever reason I had somehow left the library book I was reading on the plane.
Three days later, boarded my Alaska Airlines flight back to Portland, opened the bin to put my bag up there…and there was the book. Stamped from the library. With my boarding pass bookmark from three days ago in it.
I always booked the same seats on these trips, and this isn’t a very big plane…but this is basically a puddle jumper for Alaska Airlines, going back and forth all day between PDX, Seattle and SJC. I guess they don’t clean them that much. Or use different planes on the same route.
Way back in the dawn of time, when mighty Oak was a mere sapling, and True Grit was recently released (the real one, not the blasphemous “re-make” one), Oakmom somehow obtained an autographed picture of John Wayne, in costume as Rooster Cogburn for me. I carried it around the country with me as I moved from place to place, but I lost track of it, and assumed it was gone forever. Hadn’t seen it in years. Then last week, my Druidess was going through some boxes in the garage, and found it again! Now it sits in its rightful place of honor, safe on a shelf in my man cave, for all the world…and especially me…to see every day.
Really. I have lots several wallets over time, and they all came back to me.
The very oddest - I was doing an historical site survey in a goldmine that had not been in use for 60+ yrs. We had to cut a trail to get to it. It was a drift mine through compacted gravel, and at the end of the mine was a bunch of mioning equipment that had been very well preserved by darkness, stable temp and humidity. I lost my wallet somewhere in the mine.
I was back at the motel, freaking out over lost wallet, when the phone rang. It was the front desk. The grandson of a miner who had worked in the mine had happened to pick that day to visit the mine his great grandfather had talked about. He had found the wallet, used the ID inside to contact my wife, who had directed him to the motel I was staying at. The wallet was returned intact a few hours later, cash and cards intact.
I lost a wallet at a museum I was working at. Long after I had started to replace the papers, it showed up in the mail, from a return adress in Montana. (Alberta Canada, here). Some tourists had found it in the parking lot, and intended to return it to local police station. They forgot about it, and when they got back home, found it in their camper and mailed back to the museum (cash and cards intact).
My car was broken into, and my wallet was stolen. A few days later, a homeless guy found it (cards and ID intact, cash missing), and called me. I could tell he was nervous (he was afraid I would assume he had stolen the wallet), but I could tell just by talking to him that he wasn’t the type to have done it. I gave him $40 as a reward, even though he didn’t ask or imply that he wanted anything to return it.
Left my wallet on a bus (it fell out of my pocket). A few hours later, I get a call from the bus driver. I could go get it at their lost and found, or he would be at such and such a stop at a certain time if I just wanted to go grab it from him. It had been turned in by a passenger. The cash, cards and such were all there when I met the bus driver.
In 1974 my husband left his college class ring in a power plant bathroom. In 1989 I started working at the college we both graduated from. Shortly after I started working I got a call from the secretary in the Dean’s office. Someone at the power plant was retiring and when he cleaned out his desk he refound Mrsin’s class ring that he had originally found in the men’s room. The ring had Mrsin’s major, graduation year and initials engraved on the inside. He was the only one that fit all three that year. It was kind of cool.
A good friend of mine and I were going through a stack of old Life magazines that he’d had stashed in a shed. We were looking to see if a particular issue was in the stack.
I flipped through a few of them and from one this certificate with a gold seal slides out. It’s the friend’s birth certificate. He was stunned, as he’d had no idea anything like that was in there. So we called his mom and asked her “Guess what we found?” When we told her there was a long silence at the other end and a shocked “NO!”
Nobody knew how it ended up in the magazine, but in case Ted ever runs for President I guess it’s good to be able to produce it.
I just remembered another one…I didn’t lose the item, but I was there when it was lost and found. The story is a little long, because I think it’s funny. Feel free to disagree.
It happened like this. We were driving from Denver airport to Steamboat Springs. It started to snow. Then it started to snow heavily. That’s ok…I had a girl from Wisconsin in my car driving…and I also had a guy from Michigan in the car. But we realized the other car with us had four Cubans who grew up in South Florida. We called over to suggest we lend them one of our “snow” drivers. Their response: “Too late. We’re in a ditch.”
We found them, and stopped by the side of the road. And tried to push them back up on the road - unsuccessfully, of course. In the commotion, one of the people in our group lost a glove. That she bought on her honeymoon. In New Zealand.
We looked around for a bit, and couldn’t find it. Eventually, we gave up We left, and had a great time skiing for a week.
On the drive back, we decided to look one more time. One of the guys has a compass up his…that is…he has a great sense of direction. He picked out the spot. Of course, the snow plows had been through since then, so all the snow…now slush/ice…was piled on the side of the road.
Sure enough…less than two minutes later…we found the glove.
It’s a very distinctive pattern…no question it was hers.
And don’t worry…I’ll assume this was tldr material. I just enjoyed writing it.
This one is not really my story but I will tell it anyway.
My sister had been estranged from our father for many years. She decided to reestablish contact by mail, and wrote him a letter. Our dad responded to her eagerly and shortly thereafter, my sister visited him. They had a nice reunion and even visited me together. Three days later, our father died of a massive heart attack. After all was said and done, I was packing up a small box of our father’s things for my sister, and included the letter she had sent him that ended their estrangement. Somehow or another, it came out of the box while enroute. We assumed it was lost forever, but it eventually wound up in the mail at my house, where I had had our father’s mail forwarded. I sent it back to my sister, much more securely packaged this time!
I found a compass hiking a trail when in Cub Scouts. I lost it a bit farther down the trail when we rested. 30 plus years later I found the same compass on the trail.
