In last year's film Amélie, the title character's father wakes one day to find that his ceramic-gnome collection, to which he is very attached, has disappeared. He can only imagine that his set of little colorful men has been stolen. But later he begins receiving postcards with photos of the gnomes living it up in Russia, Egypt, China. Greetings from the Great Wall, wish you were here -- from your Ceramic Gnome. Those sorts of notes. Amélie's father is only able to sputter with frustration and incredulity upon receiving the postcards; it never occurs to him that Amélie, a delectable young Frenchwoman with a penchant for playing tricks and hatching schemes, might have something to do with his gnomes' sudden and unexpected world tour. To Amélie's father, it seems more feasible that his inanimate possessions have shoved off and left him.

I know how he feels. More often than I care to mention, my keys, wallet, or some irreplaceable, highly important piece of paper shoves off and leaves me. I am a person who loses things. Ever since I've been old enough to have things to lose, I've set about scattering my possessions -- usually the most crucial ones. I've become so accustomed to my tendency to dispossess myself of important items that I often assume I've lost things when I haven't. But before I rediscover the "lost" driver's license, the picture of my grandfather, a friend's favorite shirt, I put myself through the torture of imagining the lost item wherever it might now reside: lying lonesome in the gutter outside a bar, left abandoned on the counter of a convenience store, adjusting to the home of the person who picked it up off the subway seat.

That's the thing about losing something: just because it's lost doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore. It just means you don't know where it's doing the existing. What could be more maddening? Especially if the lost item doesn't have the courtesy to send you a postcard telling you how much it's enjoying Moscow.

Then, last week, I had that quintessential urban experience of returning to my car to find the windows smashed, the stereo gone, and my CDs, wallet, and Walkman pulled from their stealth hiding place under the driver's seat. After I got over the initial shock and primal urge to whine -- why me, why my car, why that CD no one but me likes? -- I got mad. I imagined the thief, looking somewhat like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, coming upon my broken-down but innocuous car and thinking villainously, This is the one.

Then, just to push the envelope, I incorporated my stolen stuff into the fantasy. Look, it's the thief, walking around the neighborhood using my Walkman, listening to my mix tape, using my money to buy lunch. I mean, the gnomes got a chance at a better life when they were taken from Amélie's father's front yard. They got to see Big Ben. But my stuff, I knew it could only be suffering. I certainly was. Especially when I talked to my credit-card company: in the three hours between the ramming of a lead pipe through several of my car windows and my discovery of the mayhem that had ensued, my things had been taken for several lengthy cab rides, to the movies, and to Walgreen's, where my card had been used to purchase several hundred dollars' worth of toiletries.

Of course, in real life I know that my stuff has no actual feelings about having been taken from me, just as Amélie's father's gnomes had no feelings about being taken from him. And I also know that stuff is just stuff: it's replaceable, it can't make you happy, blah blah blah. (It still sucks when it disappears. Sucks more when someone else makes it disappear.) But the thing about stuff is that its destiny is determined, much like ours, by a bizarre convergence of human intervention -- whether malicious, benevolent, or bumbling -- and routine and inconsequential events: mixed together, they have consequences. Fate? Destiny? The word now understood for the first time by millions of Americans who saw that movie with John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale?

Whatever. All I know is that first this phenomenon tooketh away, and then, miraculously, it gaveth.

Here's what happened: a couple days after the surreal scene in the parking lot, I got a strange message from a woman who didn't leave her name or number. She said she'd seen a pile of CDs on the street, and that with them was a receipt with my name on it. "I don't know if you were throwing them away, or what," she said, "but I thought I'd let you know." Then she gave the cross streets where she'd seen the CDs, adding, just before she hung up, "I just hate to see someone lose something."

I hate to see someone lose something, too. Especially when that someone is me. Besides, this was starting to feel like an episode of Matlock, and I was intrigued. So I followed the woman's directions to a stretch of street in my neighborhood, and spent 45 minutes walking around the block with my face two feet from the ground, finding nothing but insect life. I'd just about given up hope when I stumbled upon the man in front of whose home the thief had celebrated the acquisition of my stuff by passing out drunk. When he had finally staggered off, he'd left behind my CDs, perhaps deciding, in a more clear-headed state, that they were not to his taste. Imagine.

At the end of Amélie, the gnomes appear in Amélie's father's front yard as suddenly as they disappeared. He's excited but bewildered by their return, probably not knowing whether to be happy or commit himself to a mental institution. In the end, I came out in a similar state: pleased to get some of my stuff back, dizzy from the twists of fate.

When I was a kid I thought the things I misplaced went to some Lost World, but now it seems clear that they remain on earth, bumped around by the same forces that bump me around. So the next time my keys decide to shove off to see the pyramids, I'm thinking they might make it back to me. Or at the very least send a postcard.

If you've found Rebecca Wieder's driver's license, blue sweatshirt, or left contact lens, you can reach her at rebezca@juno.com.

Issue Date: June 21 - 27, 2002