Things Fall Away

Yesterday I lost a vintage brooch that was given to me as a birthday present from my daughter. I loved that brooch; it was brass with blue stones, and it came from a little antique shop in England someplace, and whenever someone complimented me on it, I would say, “Oh, yes. My daughter gave this to me.”

I had pinned it to my coat for a bit of sparkle, noticing that the clasp was not very secure, but pretty sure it would hold. We had stopped in Ventura on the way home from Orange County, and although I had one of my infamous headaches, I thought it would be fun to walk around Main Street for a little while and get some fresh air. It was still early, and the stores weren’t open, but Monte had an impulse for hot chocolate, so we sat on a velvet couch in a hip sort of coffee place, and afterwards we enjoyed a brief stroll, peering into the windows and taking pictures of little oddities and details.

In the window of the old mission shop, statues of saints lined up in a slant of sunlight. Elsewhere racks of sunglasses stared out blankly, seashells and teapots awaited perusal, and a heaven-themed store displayed a motley assortment of angels.

At one point, I reached down to make sure my brooch was still pinned to my coat, and of course it was gone. I had that whoosh of a small loss, the abrupt disappearance of an object from my life, the familiar sinking sense of things falling away.

I know it is but a whispered hint of the human condition in general, and I know this was just a tiny thing, but there was a lot of sentiment attached to it, and I wasn’t ready to admit its passing without at least a quick symbolic search.

So we retraced our steps. I went back into the hot chocolate place first, where a man was sitting on that velvet couch. He graciously got up and allowed me to poke around the cushions, where I unearthed some straws, crumbs, and crumpled napkins, but no brooch.

Then I went back outside and entered the shops, now open, into whose windows I had earlier peered, asking whether anyone had found the brooch outside. The funny thing was that every shopkeeper seemed to have been perfectly cast to represent the business that they tended.

The woman in the mission shop was a Hispanic type with long dark hair, stern and Catholic in her demeanor, and she dutifully heard my lament but couldn’t help me. The man in the angel store was a kindly cherub who looked at me with sympathetic eyes and sadly shook his head. The giving gift shop lady actually grabbed a broom and went outside to sweep around at the front of the store, and when that yielded nothing, she handed me a notepad and asked me to write my name and phone number and promised to contact me if anyone found the brooch and turned it in at her shop, a breathtakingly unlikely scenario, but I liked the constructive optimism it implied.

And by now my head hurt even more, and we had things to do, and it was time to acknowledge that the lost brooch would be someone else’s unexpected find. Monte reminded me that it was just an object, and when you consider all that has been lately lost, not very important at all. I remembered too that the daughter who gave it to me will be here in two weeks, and I cheered at the thought. Then I officially let the thing go.

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