To be honest, when I wrote “I’ll let you know where it was” that was a literary device, I needed a punch line. And when I wrote “The most powerful spell for finding a lost thing is to buy another one” that was more a mixture of wry observation and hope than expectation.
Life, however, has imitated art, and my lauded file has surfaced, perhaps four days after Grobet USA delivered the made-in-Italy replacement. I immediately put the Grobet into service and had that sinking feeling: it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t long enough, it wasn’t pointy enough, the teeth were too angled so they didn’t really work for a lefty, tending to grab and shear to the right, leaving heavy tooth marks. I thought, “Fecal matter, that does it for the spell.”
See, I thought it only worked when the replacement was a functional equivalent; so long as you still miss the original, it stays hidden. But, as I emptied a few long-stored gallon bags of emery boards into the new emery board tool drawer, there it was. Took a few strokes and yep, that’s my buddy.
Now I remember. I was working on the Seattle Pipe Club POY. I had taken the pipes with me when I visited my mom in Colorado, with my abrasives in a gallon ziploc bag. In the bag was the assortment of emery boards, the squares of sandpaper, and my file. When I returned home I blasted and finished the pipes, settled into audition prep and the ziploc bag sat like a time capsule. I kind of remembered using the file on the SPC project but couldn’t be sure.
But the spell worked in the end. Not sure how I feel about that.