The Magic Prayer

I have this mantra, taught to me by my beloved mother at a very early age. Our cat Puddy had been missing for a day or two and I was ripping around the apartment building and through our unit looking high and low in a frantic fruitless search all the while bawling like a baby at her being gone.

Mom sat me down and had me compose myself and said she’s going to teach me the “magic prayer.” And she made me repeat it after her, over and over and over:

“Nothing is lost, it is simply not revealed.”

Of course as a seven or eight year old, when Puddy did not reveal herself immediately, I went back to tearing my world apart, but at least instead of crying, I just kept saying those words over and over and over and over.

And you know what. I found Puddy soon after. She was trapped in the cabinet under the bathroom sink. Thankfully she was OK — doubly thankful because in fact, losing her had been entirely my fault. Mischievous brat that I was, I had seen her enter through the open cabinet door and I rushed up and closed it behind her. Of course I hadn’t intentionally planned on leaving her confined in the dark without any food or water for the next day-plus. At some point I must’ve gotten bored waiting for her to scratch at the door from inside and I went and found other ways to occupy that day, ultimately forgetting about her. Or at least until I couldn’t find her yet had still forgotten where I’d left her.

But me being an idiot evil child isn’t the point. The point is the magic prayer worked.

And it has done so throughout my life. I can’t give you a scientifically determined percentage of success, but over my many years when garage door openers or keys or lists, or phones or wallets or paperwork, or my sanity has vanished, I literally say those words out loud and more often than not whatever was lost becomes revealed. Sometimes it happens quickly. Sometimes not so quickly.

It happened not so quickly just this morning. Last week after the raptor presentation at Wild Birds Unlimited out in Thousand Oaks that Susan and I went to, we bought a couple of hummingbird swings. While Susan was at the market this morning I went out to mount themnext to the feeder sand in the course of screwing in the hook for the second one, it fell out and down from the porch to the brick walkway about 10 feet below with a plink. I went down and did a cursory search of the ground and came away empty handed.

So I said “Nothing is lost, it is simply not revealed” and went about my business.

A short while later, Susan got home and after putting away the groceries she came to me at my desk and handed me an eyeglass case, to which I was all “huh?”

I opened it. and inside was a long-missing favorite pair of sunglasses, themselves of which had been absent since sometime around a hike we had done, coincidentally, in Thousand Oaks nearly two years ago.

Waaaaay back then when they came up as gone I’d said the magic prayer, and then every now and then I’d remember they were still missing and tear the place apart only to end up reciting the prayer again.

Susan said she found the case in the driver side door compartment of her car where it apparently sat for aaaaall this time, because a yellow piece of paper there caught her eye. Ironically that piece of yellow paper had the address of Wild Birds Unlimited that I’d written on it and had dropped into that compartment upon our arrival last week.

Huh.

As to that hummingbird swing hook. It’ll turn up. One of these days. Or years.

Nothing is lost, it is simply not revealed. Indeed.