One week later I found it again

It’s true that we don’t know what we’ve got until we lose it, but it’s also true that we don’t know what we’ve been missing until it arrives.

Oh no! I lost my my knitted cap on the commute train the other day! I thought I’d go into town and look for it at once, but then I postponed the trip, thinking I’d never find it again. Soon I’ll do it, I thought, maybe tomorrow?

SL Center has a big container full of black and brown caps to look through on your own if you’ve lost yours on the train or a buss. A very impolite guy on the phone from the Information Service told me so, and added that you can only call in if you loose something of value, like a wallet or a purse. I didn’t have time to tell him that my cap is very valuable to me because he hung up on me! I knitted it myself you know, I wanted to tell him. Have you ever made anything like that yourself? But no, he wasn’t interested in talking about knitting.

Still it felt so uninteresting and sad to go look through a whole container of junk, so I’ve procrastinated the trip. He told me they get a new bin of lost clothes and stuff each day!!! People are careless with their possessions, maybe because they can buy new stuff so easy. This is the first time I’ve ever lost anything (except an umbrella once) on the train.

Then yesterday I went through Stuvsta train station again on my way home. I had a feeling it could be there that I had forgotten it. Maybe on one of the black benches there, where I sat for 20 minutes and wrote in my diary waiting for the train to go home after work last week.

So I squatted down through the ticket window and said:
– I thought maybe you have my cap, I lost it one week ago.
– What color was it? the kind man asked and smiled.
– It is pink.

The ticket booth in Stuvsta is special. It’s extremely small but kind of cozy compared to other SL places I’ve seen. They have a big hanging flower-pot in the dirty window, a fish tank with live fish and right now, a red electric Advent candlestick. It looks like a miniature home office, except it has windows all around with a wonderful view of the cold boring waiting room on the train station. When I wait for my train I’ve only heard classical music from within the booth…

– Only pink?
– No pink with green stripes on, I knitted it myself!
– Oh, this one?

And there it was, with a label on top that said “lost property”. I signed a release form and got back my cap. My smile was big and contagious as I walked away, cap in hand. Sometimes you have to go back in your own tracks to understand what you’ve lost, that’s the sentiment of this story.

Be well.