Stuff and nonsense

Every time I leave a place, I take a moment to look around.

It’s a habit I first developed when my children were small. We’d go out to breakfast, and when we got up to leave the table, I’d let my husband go ahead with the kids and I’d look over the table, searching among the empty plates and crumpled napkins for stray sippy cups, left-behind coloring books, baby blankets, mittens and hats. You name it, it got left behind.

I do the visual sweep when I leave theaters and auditoriums, buses and trains, taxis and rideshares and public restrooms.

Now that the youngest of the kids is a teenager, it’s gone from cups and markers to phones and earbuds, but I still look, even when I’m by myself.

Given that, you’d think I’d never lose anything. But I still manage to leave my bag under the seat, where I can’t see it, or drop a favorite pen under a table.

Still, I think it’s a good and prudent thing to check your surroundings before leaving, as flight attendants routinely advise.

Some things are no big deal to replace — witness the sippy cup that one of my kids threw from their stroller into the Chicago River; there was no getting that back. Some things, like a wallet or a phone, will take a lot of time and effort and more than a few dollars.

Good thing that, more often than not, when I’ve left something important behind, it’s still there when I go back for it.

But it makes me think: What is important enough to go back for? My bag with wallet, insulin, glucose monitor? Absolutely. A pen, even one of my Pilot G2’s? Probably not. But there’s a wide stretch in between.

Sometimes I wish my kids would have been more careful about losing stuff. We have practically a deck of cards’ worth of replacement high school IDs from my older kids, and I once found three copies of our house key in a backpack when I cleaned it out at the end of the school year. All of them had been “lost.”

There have been lost phones (dropped in the gap between the L car and the platform, left in a train station bathroom in Spain), lost wallets, lost books, lost water bottles and lost pencil cases.

Given my own propensity to lose things, I don’t feel like I can say too much about it to them. As they have grown up, though, I see them taking more responsibility for finding what they have lost or replacing it. They are learning.

At the same time, I’m glad they’re not too hung up on “stuff.” Maybe not being able to keep track of all the stuff just means we have too much of it. In any case, it’s more important to focus on leaving behind a better world, by whatever measure, than to worry about whether I’ve forgotten to pick up all my things.