Forget your Land of Lost Loves (Gatsby). Forget your Land of Lost Boys (Peter Pan or Pinocchio). Your land of Lost Dreams (Broadway and Hollywood). Your Land of Lost Teeth (cc my dentist). Your Land of Lost Anchormen (Brian Williams). Forget whatever you consider irrevocably lost. The most lost of the lost is a single glove. It's the lost gloves that mainly bedevil me. Every winter morning I am confronted by a pile of single gloves, and since I am right handed, it is usually my right hand glove that is discovered missing prior to taking my dog Sam the Lab for his walk in the now freezing Central Park.
There is the expensive sheepskin glove that was a long ago birthday gift; a tan pigskin glove that belonged to my late father in the forties; there is the warm and wonderful cashmere lined leather one I bought as a pair last year -- found at the bottom of the clearance pile in a pseudo British store on Madison Avenue. All lost because I find it necessary to remove the right glove when I clean up after Sam the Lab by opening up a little bag which I cannot do with that glove on, and somehow the glove I have removed goes directly to that Land of the Lost... while I assume that I have placed the glove in some pocket I no longer have a complete set of any glove -- and I put it all on the memory of my beautiful mother.
She pinned my gloves to some elastic contraption when I went out to play in the snow so that it was impossible to lose them. And never having learned to mind my gloves I face the world unmatched but if truth be told, untroubled. Now that I am no longer the person I had been but an EOM -- an eccentric old man -- the unmatched glove is merely part of my new persona. When I do buy gloves I am restricted to buying street gloves -- five dollars top price -- and even these manage to get themselves lost within a month, although I find that the cheaper the glove the longer it manages to stay in my life as a pair. Fortunately, my dog Sam doesn't care what glove I am wearing when I take him for a walk on his leash -- or off. I wonder if he can be trained to sniff out a lost glove -- after all as a Lab he can sniff out explosives, narcotics and fugitives . But I doubt if he would descend to something as lowly as searching for a lost glove when there are so many good sticks to sniff out and carry in his mouth.