What Was Lost is Found

First, let's just get out of the box:

DOLLI FOUND OUR CAMERA!!!!

But First----

DOLLI LOST OUR CAMERA!!!

When you announce you've lost something, people always ask: "Where'd you lose it?" A great query. Makes me long for The Honeymooners, Ralph and Norton. I supposed sometimes it's OK if it's clear that we're early into the investigation... but of course... if we knew, we'd know, and we wouldn't in the first place have, etc. etc. (Red face/laugh track)

Also, after a lifetime of not being able to find the zipper on my own pants, in my tenure with Dolli, the walking, breathing, proof positive of the existence of the Chaos Theory of the Universe, I've become fabulous at finding things.
"Shit!"
"What?"
"I can't find my left eye, and I'm already 4 days late for work!"
At this point I put on my galoshes, playtex living gloves, wade in and immediately determine she placed her left eye under the slightly tipped baby bottle of Olay Eye Lifting serum in the "you've died and been condemned to hell" cosmetics/triage closet next to her morning launch pad/mad scientist, pass the instruments tray area formerly known as a sink.

In other words, I've gotten really, really good at this.

But this time, no luck.

We looked everywhere, we asked Liz if she had any recollection that might be useful. We asked Joe, who, typically, had a 2 word/3 syllable response that made us laugh really hard but put us in no compass direction we could detect. We asked at restaurants (even ones we hope to eat at one day) Dolli posted querries all over the known universe, even sending diplomatic pouches to Bancock and other ports far and wide.

I called the woman who provides the cleaning crew that comes once a month, thinking one of the girls might recall seeing it in what might be an odd place and putting it somewhere (other than in her cleavage) to get it out of the way in order to clean a surface, only to send everyone into a tizzy, our cleaning crew chief beside herself (I am her only client that provides doughnut holes), the owner of the company doing current criminal checks on all the girls.... pretty weird.

So we narrowed it down to only two possibilities. The first involved our two old schoolfriends, the husband and wife Methodist Minister team who have a church in Parma. No one would ever think such well modulated (well, HE is) people dedicated to the Word of God (did I mention it's in Parma, which would emphatically confirm they MUST be doing the Lord's work) would ever make any, much less the short list of reprobates that might steal this camera... but we DID show it to them and they DID really like it and they DO need this kind of instamatic quality as they ready to embark on their next CHURCH GROUP TRIP. And they have a great cover.
The second , and far more remote possibility was that Dolli dropped or left it somewhere, i.e. lost the camera.
Not having the balls to call our dear ministerial friends who shall not here be named (The Kuntz's) on the carpet for this, we chose to live the lie that it was simply and randomly lost and move on.

Part of moving on was grieving the loss of the memory card, which contained some heartwarming pix of our gravely ill Uncle Bob and others of Dolli's extended family , numbering around 947 (some of them over 9 feet tall) taken at a recent high school graduation party, so the pain wasn't the loss of the camera, but the memory card and the lost photos.

So this afternoon, Dolli was researching our next camera, and we were going to go out and get it somewhere as a means to get me out of the house on Father's Day. But first, we needed to call Dolli's dad and wish him happy returns of the day. As we spoke on speaker phone, my biz phone rang, my partner in NEW YORK calling me on a Sunday afternoon, suggesting I call our client for Monday IN NEW YORK, to find out if it would be OK to bring one of our NEW YORK based interns to a shoot at the NEW YORK City Ballet! Did I mention that may partner has our client's NEW YORK phone number... and I'm in Ohio, which isn't NEW YORK?

Anyway, as I was finishing up I hear the back screen door slam (I replaced a number of the pistons on the outer doors in the house with old fashioned, from my childhood, springs so that I could, in my own house, slam the door if I wanna), and a remarkably animated Dolli came bounding onto the living room with... you guessed it.

There's no punch line here. One of the activities we didn't place in our timeline investigation was going out with our 84 year old friend Goldie Eagle (yup... bet you wish YOUR name was...), a wonderful and fine woman. As an aside, I'm convinced that if you were to accuse HER of such an act, you'd be instantly transported to old Salem and find yourself at once on fire, pelted by stones and serving as a canvas for Burton the retarded guy next door and his really cool wood burning pen.

Well, we DID go out with her. When we do, upon reboarding the car to drive to dinner, Dolli moves into the back seat and Goldie the front. So while Dolli was on the phone with her folks, she had a vision. It was of her hand pulling open the pouch attached to the back of the passenger's seat, while the other hand dropped the camera in. Had it been lit properly, done in slo -mo and accompanied by some sort of Tangerine Dream type of electronica and involving a mysterious viscuous material, it could have qualified for a Michael Mannesque CSI Miami flashback moment.

But as it didn't include all those wondrous cinematic qualities, it was just Dolli remembering where she left the camera.

Thanks everyone, for staying in the room and/or on the phone as we repeatedly described exactly how we minute, by minute, did not find our camera over the last couple weeks.

Now smile real pretty.... and....!!!