Lost iPod

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

So once I started moving around again and trying to gather things together for short trips around town, I began looking for my iPod. I think I was going to put the Wood Bros. album on it, in fact, when I realized that it wasn't in my purse. I went to my bigger purse and dug in it. No small black case. Unfazed, I turned to the large green L.L. Bean messenger bag that had been my lifeline during the last few weeks of school and started looking through the vast wreckage of paperwork and other debris from my last day moving out of my classroom. Nada. Zip. Zero. The first trickles of alarm started to make themselves felt. I tottered around my house, and with the help of my mother, proceeded to to generally destroy my kitchen, go through every box I brought home, contort into impossible positions to explore the vehicles, look under and behind all the major pieces of furniture, and peer into all the containers or bags that might have possibly held my iPod. It was a completely fruitless search.

I don't know where it is. My parents speculate that we somehow managed to pack and tape it up in one of the 22 boxes currently in storage at school. I am praying that this is the case. That iPod, as silly as this will sound, is special to me.

It's not the thing itself so much as what it represents to me. Dad gave me the money to buy it. I had been wanting one for a long time, but coming up with big chunks of money to blow on electronic gadgets, as much as I do love them, is not something I can do very often. Dad had gotten an annual bonus at work, and he gave me part of it with very specific instructions to spend it on something I wanted, not on a bill, household repairs, or anything like that. I sat and thought about it, probably far longer than the situation warranted, and I decided that an iPod was the thing I most wanted.

I went to the online Apple Store, and I ordered the Product Red edition Nano. I even had it engraved on the back. I loved it from the moment I took it out of the box. It wasn't just the sleekness of the design and the fact that, at last, I had such a huge chunk of my music with me. I could feel that same happy surprise and that same loved feeling I felt when Dad gave me the money for it each time I used it.

Hopefully, when the boxes are all opened and my room is restored to whatever configuration the 2009-2010 school year will have, I'll find that small black case amongst all the binder clips and hanging file folders. It will be a wonderful small miracle with which to start the year. In the meanwhile, I went to amazon and found a 2nd generation refurbished Shuffle for about $20 so I'll have something to take on a trip later this month and to use throughout the months to come. It won't begin to take the place of my beloved Nano, but maybe it can be a substitute for the time being.