SCHMO-JACK

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me...
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.

- John Newton

Every so often, I get lost.

When I get lost in my own little Mental World, the Missus says that I’m “lost in the cheese aisle.” But sometimes I get physically misplaced.

It’s not that I wander off, like some Alzheimer Daddy...although that has happened on occasion. One time, a small horde of us visited Dahlonega. At some point in the proceedings, I walked into one of those old country stores on the square, oblivious to everyone else’s frantic attempts to determine my whereabouts. Eventually, we all hooked back up, but not before SWMBO spent several worried moments thinking that I had been abducted by either Space Aliens or a bunch of North Georgia Hill-Williams.

My ability to hide in plain sight may be partially at fault.

One time, the Missus left me at the local Borders as she went off to a few of the neighboring stores. I parked myself in a comfortable chair and grabbed a few books. After what seemed to be a few hours, I started getting nervous. Where had the Missus gone? Had she forgotten me? I started searching the nearby shops, all to no avail.

When I ran into a fuming mad, worried SWMBO in the parking lot, I found out what had happened. The Missus had gone back to the bookstore to find me, but somehow did not see me in what I had thought was a reasonably prominent location. She had me paged, but I (evidently) did not hear the page. After about an hour of fruitless searching, she started to become really concerned. Had I pulled an Elvis, collapsing in the restroom in Mid-Shit?

She called our friends Gary and JoAnn to enlist their help. And just as Gary was on his way into the bookstore, there to look in the Men’s Room for my unconscious body, she saw me striding across the parking lot...looking for her.

We were both tremendously relieved...and mightily pissed off at each other. But in retrospect, I am almost certainly to blame. Usually, I’ll just stand there in the aisles at Borders, devouring book after book. Perhaps I should not have sat down.

Because, apparently, when I sit down, I become invisible.

To wit: Once, the Missus and I were at one of the local malls, in a shop called White Slavery Black Face White House Black Market that specializes in - you guessed it - women’s wear in the basic colors of white and black. While the Missus ducked into a dressing room to try on a couple of items, I sat down on a convenient bench in the store, and promptly fell asleep.

Because being in the seated position renders me invisible, SWMBO did not see me snoozing there...and so she proceeded to spend the next hour and a half running the length and breadth of the mall, looking for me.

Maybe if I had had my cell phone, she could have contacted me. But no.

When I woke up, I had no idea where she was. But just as I began to call her (she had her cell phone) from the store’s land line, she spotted me.

“Where the hell were you? I’ve been looking everywhere!”

She had checked all my usual Mall-Haunts. Godiva. Lindt. The bookstore. All, of course, to no avail...because I had never left White House Black Market.

There is a solution, of course, and it is to be found in Modern Technology.

The same device that foils car thieves can be adapted to help find Misplaced Husbands. Simply attach it to the Wayward Helpmeet, and a radio signal can track him down, enabling rapid recovery.

I call it the Schmo-Jack. Anyone wanna invest?