Dear LPG readers,  

One thing is for sure, and that is that as we get older we all have more senior moments and, while it has happened to me many a time during my many younger years, the classic reminder of the fact has to be those occasions when you have gone all the way from one end of the house and arrived at the other having forgotten what you went for. 

Losing things definitely happens more often as we get older, and another symptom of age is often not having the patience to deal with missing something gracefully.   I read a really old LPG article which offered a few solutions about finding lost things and another which reminded of that feeling of relief that is experienced when we finally find that which was lost, and I can definitely relate to both of them (►►►)   (►►►). 

One would think that both ends of the lost and found synergies are well and truly covered between the two articles but there is one more to be added.   The ‘lost and gone forever’  also needs to be brought to the fore and I have had about forty years to lament over the story I am going to tell now.    

At the time, I was at that point in life where I was beginning to feel seriously ‘old’.  My unattached friends were still spending their after-work evenings and weekends doing all those things that the young, free and single lads are able to do, but I had graduated to marriage and parenthood and, although many of my bachelor friends admitted to being a little envious of we married men, the jealousy worked both ways.           

On the day in question, I was off to experience one of many ‘family firsts, from the ‘Dad’ point of view; something I suspect that many of my still-single counterparts were still looking forward to.  I am talking about that first outing to the theme park with the wife and kids.   

It was a hot day and being a responsible father meant protecting their young heads from the UV rays.  We found the perfect set of family accessories for the job in the onsite shop and,  we could have chosen a set of cheaper head protectors but baseball caps had just become all the rage and my two boys instantly gravitated towards the ones that had the logo of the theme park featured on the front.   

My wife declined to be part of the uniformed family group but, at great expense and, in spite of the worry of how much lunch at one of the parks many eating houses was going to cost, I bought one for each of the male family members and handed them out with that warning  about looking after them.  

At the time I had one child who was unusually tall for his age and another who was not which meant that one son and my wife spent a lot of time on the ground watching my taller son and myself proving just how white our knuckles could get.  But she was never one for heights and she appeared quite happy to do the tamer rides with our younger boy.   

Soon my older son and I were strapped in and winging our way around the park's fiercest roller coaster while I was busy making sure that my son’s perception of me as a ‘father afraid of nothing’ did not get tarnished. I was so focused on that aspect of the next few minutes that I only remembered my baseball cap when I felt it leave my head and free-fall out of view.   

I was not really worried about the loss of the hat but I was more than a bit humiliated at being the owner of the hat that changed my trio of purchases into a duo after the lecture I gave my children about taking care of them.  

The children who wore them that day have long since taken their own children on  similar family outings while the two remaining caps ended up in a cupboard.  Their importance shrank, and they were never even thought of after the outing, but every now and then those two remaining baseball caps find themselves at the top of a box of family memorabilia.  

The irony is that the sight of those two hats will always remind me of the one that took the fall and put a serious dent in my credibility as a  ‘competent father’ on that 1980’s day. 

BV, Catford