Tonight I went to the gym. I went into the locker room and opened up a locker. It had some things in it, as sometimes is the case when a trusting soul doesn’t use a lock. I noticed a pair of shoes that looked remarkably like an old pair I used to have but hadn’t seen in months, and the thought occurred to me that, hey, maybe someone stole my shoes, and that’s why I hadn’t seen them, and here they are again! But it was just a thought, so I closed that locker and opened the one to its immediate right which was empty, proceeded to change, put my things away, and put a lock on the door. I was about to go out and thought, hey, let me take another look in that unlocked locker. I looked in there and carefully pulled out one reminiscent shoe, holding it at arm’s length. I brought it closer and inspected it, noting how remarkably it looked like my old one. Probably really was my old one, but I wasn’t completely sure yet. I looked at the other one. Then I noted that there was also a pair of underwear in the corner of the locker which was identical to a particular pair I had once had and also hadn’t seen for a while, come to think of it, but underwear being underwear, one doesn’t tend to give it much thought or feel much of a loss or even necessarily notice if a particular pair wanders off. But I recognized this one as mine, and the combined weight of the two pieces of evidence, shoes and underwear, clinched the fact that they were both mine. I next asked myself how long it had been since I had seen those shoes, and I recalled that they had disappeared around the time I moved, which was the end of last September. I’d always assumed they were around the house somewhere, or in a box somewhere, but here they were in a locker and they had presumably been in that same locker since the end of September! Which would be: all of October, November, December, January, and over half of Feburary. So the facts are that my shoes and a couple other things (there was also a nondistinct tee shirt I didn’t mention) were sitting calmly and patiently in an unlocked locker in my gym, undisturbed, for four and a half months. I laughed out loud! Then I closed the door and left the items there rather than transfer them to my locked locker, because what was one additional hour after those four and a half months going to do?

But when I came back after working out, my long lost things were gone and the locker was empty.

All right, that didn’t really happen; of course everything was still there. I took it all home, my beloved pair of sneakers among the other items. And to think that months ago I had considered tossing them out because they were old and falling apart. What would have happened if I hadn’t found my old things? How long would they have persisted in that locker? Probably until the death of the universe.