Getting Lost

The year was 1984. The place was the Sears on New Hampshire Avenue. My mother had taken me there so she could shop for clothes. Watching a woman shop for clothes is excruciatingly boring. I hate doing it now and I certainly didn’t enjoy doing it back then when I was a hyper four year old boy.

As my wife has had to learn the hard way, I can patiently wait for someone else to shop for a good ten to fifteen minutes. But fifteen is pretty much my limit. Once we cross that threshold I start nagging, complaining, and threatening to wait in the car… or worse yet, I threaten to leave in the car.

I just don’t get what takes so long. If you’re looking for a shirt, pick out two or three that you like, try them on, buy the one that looks the best… and that’s it. It should be that simple. Get in, get out. If you want me to wait around for anything more than that, you need to bribe me… Back when I was four that could be taken care of with a trip to the toy store and/or McDonald's. Now it takes a trip to the bookstore and/or McDonald's.

On the date in question, my mom had bribed me with a trip to the Toys R Us a couple miles down the road… I was cooperating about as well as could be expected of me. Sure I had spent the whole time complaining, but at least I hadn’t wandered off once.

At some point I decided to play a soldier game where I would hide inside a near by clothes rack and pretend to be shooting it out with bad guys while my mom shopped… To this day I have a vivid memory of tugging on her jacket before I went inside of a big coat rack and telling her to “let me know” when she was ready to move on… To be fair, my mother insists that this was not the case. She claims I just hid inside one of the coat racks without mentioning anything to her.

Regardless of who you want to believe, what isn’t in question is that at some point she thought I was gone and went off looking for me… and at some point I realized she was gone, and I went looking for her. We must have gone searching for each other in opposite directions, and just like that, I was lost.

I wandered the store for what felt like hours, but was actually probably only 15 or 20 minutes. I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but eventually I decided to roll the dice and ask someone for help. I found the nicest old lady I could and approached her with tears streaming down my face and told her the story of what happened the way I had seen it, “my mom left me…”

I was convinced that my mom had grown tired of my constant complaining and decided to leave me. And so that’s what I told the old lady.

She took me to security and told them that she had found me alone and crying and that I had been abandoned by my mother. The security guard asked me what my mother’s name was, but I was too upset to remember, and within minutes the announcement went out across the store… “Would Joel’s mother please report to security… Joel’s mother…”

A couple seconds later I saw my mother approaching with tears streaming down her face as well. I ran towards her and she picked me up in her arms. I promised her that I would never be so impatient again if she would just take me back… I was still convinced that she had intentionally left me.

Of course security wanted to have a few words with my mom, but she wasn’t about to stick around for that. We high tailed it out of there and 24 years she had never gone back to that Sears again.

Flash forward to present day… I live within walking distance of that Sears.

I told my wife the story when we first moved into the neighborhood and now every time we go there I have to endure the “don’t go far” and “hey little boy, where’s your mother?” jokes… Needless to say it’s not my favorite place to shop.

My mom came down to visit yesterday. The idea was to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon watching movies together. She brought “Gone Baby Gone” because I hadn’t seen it yet.

About halfway through the movie the DVD froze. It got stuck on a really pivotal scene and just wouldn’t advance… We tried cleaning the DVD and even switching DVD players, but nothing worked… and of course after seeing half the movie I couldn’t just say “oh well, maybe I’ll catch the rest on cable some night.” I had to see the end.

The only thing we could do was go buy another copy… you know, from Sears… gulp…

So there we were, me and my mom, 24 years later, returning to the scene of the crime.

“Do you wanna go look for some clothes while we’re here?” I joked.

She didn’t find it as funny as I did.

We walked over to the New Releases in DVD section and searched for it. We couldn’t find it. We asked one of the workers near by if they had any copies left.

“That’s the move about the lost kid right?” he asked.

I laughed at the irony… Again, my mom didn’t think it was as funny as I did… and of course they were all sold out.

We eventually went to a Blockbuster video to rent a copy, which made our little trip take a whole lot longer than we had anticipated. We no longer had time to watch a second movie. And we got soaked in the pouring rain… But on the bright side, at least I didn’t get lost.