What If..

by Madeleine Kando

I lost my favorite pair of sunglasses. The ones I bought in Paris for a hundred euros during a bout of temporary insanity. My daughter calls me ‘bug eyes’ when I wear them because they cover most of my face.

So you see, I was in a state of shock when I lost them. It happened while I was walking my diminutive dog in the local forest. When I discovered that they were missing, I first searched the house, which took me a while because I am not known to put things in their proper place.

Then I went back to the forest, retracing my steps, remembering that I had bent over and picked up my diminutive dog in spots where she would have disappeared in the underbrush because of her size. Pouf, that’s when my sunglasses must have fallen off my head.

I didn’t find them and cursed myself and the person who had found them and who was now enjoying my hundred euros perched on her nose.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept hearing this barely audible little voice calling out to me: ‘I am here! I am here! Please find me’, like one of the shrunken kids in the movie ‘Honey I shrunk the kids’.

I just couldn’t resign myself to the loss of all that money. Besides I had grown attached to those glasses. They were part of me, especially early in the morning to hide my puffy eyes and feed my vanity.

So back I went a second time, retracing my every step. I put another pair of sunglasses on my head to see when and how they would fall off.

Almost at the end of my sad, fruitless walk I suddenly remembered that, at that exact spot, my diminutive dog had decided to go her own way instead of following me. I had to run after her and quickly pick her up before she disappeared in the underbrush. Aha! This is the scene of the crime, I realized. The underbrush had not swallowed up my dog, but my sunglasses instead.

I looked closely, stopping every few feet.. no sunglasses. I walked a little further..Hey! What’s that? A small speck of shiny brown amongst the green! ‘Mmm.. somebody must have dropped their sunglasses’ I thought. ‘Oh well, tough luck.’ Wait a minute.. those are mine! The odds that I would find them was so small that I thought I was dreaming.

So here I am, happy as a pig in mud. I am wearing my sunglasses as I type, even though it’s raining. We are bonding. I am still trying to digest my good fortune and my thoughts go something like this:

What if I had not had the good fortune of possessing an obsessive compulsive nature and gone back a second time? What if I had not remembered my dog’s determination to go her own way? What if I had not turned the loss of my stupid sunglasses into a major calamity, giving it priority over everything else?

What if I hadn’t lost my sunglasses at all? This story wouldn’t have been written and you wouldn’t have had the privilege of reading a masterpiece. leave comment here