by Kay Hafner

Sometime last month I lost my calendar book. It was a rather easygoing summer and I�d forgotten what it was like to have to pull the calendar out every day to scrutinize our schedule. The closer it got to September, the more I realized it was going to be another busy fall. I needed to get some activities and dates in The Book before I forgot them or, worse, before I started double booking.

Now where did it go?

The last time I remembered using it I was at the YMCA, looking up someone�s phone number as I called from the pay phone. I couldn�t make it to her house that morning because, of all things, I was helping my daughter find her lost bathing suit. It was the second day of dance camp and she�d forgotten to bring her suit home on Monday. So, I was checking the lost and found and eyeing the nooks and crannies looking for a plastic Hannaford bag with a soggy suit and towel.

One Hannaford bag looks just like another, and there are lots of them at the Y, holding lots of soggy suits and towels. Someone else�s child probably went home with a bag containing my daughter�s green, blue and yellow plaid suit and a generic blue towel. I brought another towel that day and we were able to borrow another suit. Camp started and all was fine. Except that in the middle of this muddle I lost track of my datebook.

I sometimes think there�s a grand exchange program in the works. That�s why I�m not too worried about the towel. One February a few years back a guest left a pink and purple striped beach towel at our house. We�d had a "Come in from the Cold" party and encouraged people bring picnic food and wear summer gear. We never found out the towel�s owner and my daughter soon fell in love with it. We�ve gotten a lot of use out of it, just as someone somewhere is using the blue towel we left behind at the Y last month.

No harm done; what comes around goes around.

I do hate the feeling that comes over you when you realize you�ve lost something. That pit-of-the-stomach, how-stupid-could-I-be sinking feeling. "If only I could just go back an hour, a day, a week," I think, willing to pay anything for a trip in a time machine.

One of the worst feelings I ever got losing something was the diamond out of a family heirloom ring. It fell out just before Christmas one year and I spent the whole holiday hoping no one noticed I wasn�t wearing the ring. I knew the prongs were loose. Why didn�t I get it fixed? A couple months later I miraculously found the diamond, on the floor of the backseat of my car. It looked at first like a clump of snow or piece of ice. I was so excited, and amazed that it had been sitting there all that time without being disturbed or noticed.

Speaking of lost jewelry, a couple years back I lost an onyx bead necklace, a fifth anniversary present from my husband, given to me just weeks before our daughter was born. I still have the matching earrings but whenever I wear them, I can�t help but think of the missing necklace. I don�t even know where it fell off.

Decades earlier, when I was in elementary school, I talked my mother into letting me wear a signet ring that had belonged to my great aunt, my namesake. It was too large and slipped off. For years I would check back in with the school lost and found to see if someone had happened to find it.

I�ve spent weeks now expecting the calendar book to show up. I�ve reached multiple time under my car seat, lifted up piles of books I know haven�t been touched in months�just in case. Last week, when I was purchasing some school supplies I bought a smaller pocket calendar for myself, acknowledging I couldn�t wait any longer for it to turn up. Part of me thinks that buying a new one and settling into using it will pretty much ensure that the old one surfaces . . . at some point, when I don�t need it anymore.

Another part of me figures that someday soon a bathing suit will cross my path, a reminder that the cosmic lost and found department has its own plans.

On the Bright Side appears every other Thursday in The Post-Star. Any comments about her columns, or leads on her datebook, can be sent to Kay�s email address: [email protected].